My Musical Advent Calendar

"Soul Christmas" /

Graham Parker

 

After James Brown yesterday, I just couldn't resist.

 

You know -- or maybe you don't -- what an over-the-top Graham Parker fan I am.  I realize that not too many of you may own his delicious 1994 EP Graham Parker's Christmas Cracker (although that is a lack you could quickly remedy by clicking this link.)  But if you are among the lucky few who are currently in possession of this gem, you'll know that "Soul Christmas" is a holiday classic just waiting to be discovered. 

 

 

It's as if GP has invited us to his own personal holiday bash. Okay, okay, things start out traditional -- Christmas tree, "A Wonderful Life," yadda yadda yadda -- but when the kids get bored, our cool cat Chairman kicks it up a notch, inviting all of his classic soul heroes to step up to the mike. He does it all in a syncopated talking blues that's as cool-cat as a cool cat can get. And for good measure, he's got the inimitable Nona Hendryx throwing in backing vocals.

 

It's like a holiday edition of Arthur Conley's "Sweet Soul Music," name-checking all the greats: Sam and Dave, James Brown, Mary Wells, Eddie Floyd, and all the Stax house band -- Booker T, Al Jackson, Donald "Duck" Dunn, Steve Cropper.  We get Sam Cooke, Carla Thomas, Otis Redding, the whole Memphis crew.

 

But wait -- there's more!  GP dips into the stocking and pulls out Don Covay, Little Milton, Al Green, Junior Walker.  This is a man who seriously knows his soul music roots. Yeah, okay, in his own records he has brewed those soul influences up with reggae, folk, country, and everything else in the book. (Because that's what a creative genius does: he digests all the classic stuff and makes something new and wonderful and uniquely his own.) But this track has forever wed me to the vision of a young Graham Parker in his teenage bedroom spinning these soul platters and drinking in their essence to the core of his musical DNA.

 

And of course, the great question is -- where's Aretha? "Where is the Queen of Soul?" he asks. "Is that sweet Mama gonna grace us with her presence / Hey, when is Aretha gonna show?" And don't we all love Aretha? (Although GP has another song about that...)

 

Does Aretha ever get to the party? She doesn't like to fly, we all know that, but I like to think she drives up in her pink Cadillac as the chorus goes into a fade. Because Graham has thrown the ultimate soul Christmas party here, and it would be a shame if Aretha wasn't there.   

"I Was Made to Love Her" / Stevie Wonder

Ah, that harmonica.  Who else but Stevie Wonder?

I had been thinking about Stevie and the harmonica lately -- something I heard on the grocery store musak, although I couldn't swear it was a Stevie tune. But that sweet, swinging harmonica made me suddenly hunger to listen to Stevie Wonder.

And then, by serendipity, in an email thread I learned this morning that some dear buddies from my first New York City job were all also having Stevie Wonder marathons to combat the cabin fever of being snowbound.

But of course! 

It's early, granted -- 1967, when Stevie was just sixteen years old, before he really took the reins of his own career. Though he co-wrote this song, his mother, Motown songwriting headmistress Sylvia Moy, and his producer Henry Cosby had a hand in it as well. (Moy was from Arkansas, which is why it begins with the baffling line "I was born in Little Rock," whereas Stevie originally hailed from Saginaw, Michigan.)

But he claims it was autobiographical, about the first girl he ever fell in love with, and the pure joy of first-time love runs through it like a shot of adrenaline.  He's already trying out his own version of talking-blues-soul -- "You know my papa disapproved it / My mama boohooed it" (can't you just imagine Bob Dylan crooning that?).

On the invaluable website Song Facts, I read that Henry Cosby took Stevie to a Baptist church in Detroit to show him how a gospel preacher might sing this. He also dragged people off the street into the studio so that Stevie could sing it to an audience -- Stevie always sang better with an audience. Now there's a brilliant producer for you. Whatever he did to coax the magic into being, it worked.

Maybe it was the older songwriters who pushed this song into a celebration of long-standing love ("That's why we made it through the years"). Stevie had probably been with that girl for weeks, months if he was lucky, not "years." But he sells it with such confidence, I never questioned it.

What really sticks with me, though, is the images of those kids -- "I was high-top shoes and shirt tails / Suzy was in pigtails," and in the last verse, "I was knee-high to a chicken when that love bug hit me."  Seven years later, Stevie would start out "I Wish" (on his masterpiece Songs in the Key of Life) "Looking back on when I / Was a little nappy-headed boy."  What a journey he'd traveled between this song and that one.

But it was a huge, I mean HUGE hit in 1967, preventing from hitting Number 1 on the charts only by the massive megahit "Light My Fire" by the Doors.  (Think of those two songs emerging at the same moment in time.)  That commanding bass (James Jamerson?), that sassy guitar line, crisp horns held back in the mix, and above all the soaring exuberance of Stevie's harmonica.  An instant classic, it was. And it sounds as fresh today as it did 48 years ago.

Sweet Soul Music /
Arthur Conley
Novelty track?  You decide. This was Arthur Conley's only real hit, but man, it swings. And sure, the whole point of it is to name-check other, greater, more durable talents on the soul scene in 1967 -- but let's give Arthur his due, okay?

It certainly helped that Arthur had recently come under the tutelage of the late great Otis Redding, who co-wrote this song with him and supervised its recording in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.  (Check out the Muscle Shoals regulars, guitarist Steve Cropper and bassist Donald "Duck" Dunn behind Conley on that tiny bandstand.)  Technically, he also co-wrote it with Sam Cooke, since it was based on Cooke's minor hit "Yeah Man" ("do you like all the dances? Yeah, man...") But Conley and Redding transformed that track completely, stealing an arresting horn fanfare from The Magnificent Seven intro and cranking the funk level up to eleven. 

This song deserved its brief reign at #2 (oh, so close!) on BOTH the R&B and pop charts. I remember how it cleared the sidelines at eighth grade dances that summer, everyone jumping up to join in on the dance floor. "Do you like good music," we'd raucously sing along with Arthur . . . because indeed we did.

I'll even so so far as to say that Conley's charmer holds its own against the six songs he refers to in the course of the song.  Why don't you listen and judge for yourself?

Arthur doesn't mention Smokey Robinson and the Miracles by name -- but come on, EVERYBODY back then would have picked up on the first verse's reference to this December 1965 Motown classic.

And how about this soul-drenched 1966 hit from Lou Rawls, mentioned in verse 2 ("oh don't he look tall, y'all?")

 
And the incomparable Stax soul duo Sam & Dave, of "Soul Man" fame -- this March 1966 hit was their first major breakthrough record.

By the time "wicked" Wilson Pickett released this hot hot hot single "Mustang Sally," we already knew him from "In the Midnight Hour," not to mention "Land of 1000 Dances" -- which sorta paved the way for Conley's song by name-checking current dance crazes.

Okay, here's one that I would rank above "Sweet Soul Music" -- a 1966 hit by Conley's mentor Otis Redding, who tragically would only survive Conley's tribute by a few months.

And last but certainly not least -- the Godfather of Soul and the hardest working man in show business, Mr. James Brown. It wasn't for nothing that Conley refers to him as "the king of them all -- since 1964's "Out of Sight," James Brown had pushed soul music to new funky frontiers. Conley doesn't single out any particular Brown tracks, but going with Conley's general 1966 time frame, I'm throwing in Brown's big-production diva number, "It's a Man's World." Why not?

Next to all these monumental singles, Arthur Conley's uptempo dance number comes off as a refreshing alternative. Was he trying to put himself in their league?  No way.  (It's interesting to note that in later years Conley moved to Europe and changed his name, not so much to escape this hit but to give himself space to do other kinds of music.)  But the effervescent joy of this song is hard to resist.  I'm out of my chair and dancing already.

"Girl Watcher" / The O'Kaysions
"Want Ads" / Honey Cone

Rarely do I write about two songs at once, but I just couldn't resist.  I heard both of these today -- one over the PA system at a grocery store, the others on the 60s station of Sirius/XM -- and it struck me how perfectly they complement each other.  They're both light-hearted soul gems, but like yin and yang, they express the two flip sides of male and female lust. 

When I heard it, I instantly remembered that O'Kaysions song Girl Watcher (though I really had forgotten that crazy spelling of their band name).  As an adolesent in 1968, this song deeply offended me.  I was just old enough to hate guys who lounge around on the street, ogling every female who walks past.  (Come to think of it, I still hate those guys.)  Sure, I could tell it was supposed to be funny, but to me it was just more of that "Standing on the Corner, Watching All the Girls Go By" mentality.  The soul vibe of this song is so tight, I always pictured the singer as a jaunty black dude in tight flared jeans and a polyester shirt -- pretty much the whole look parodied in Undercover Brother.  I have just discovered that the O'Kaysions were white soul singers from North Carolina (I suspect they're still living on the royalties from this song, their only Top Ten hit), and I have to say I'm impressed.  But still, I see that jive brother when I hear this song.   

What I didn't get as a kid -- what I couldn't pick up -- is how healthy this guy's eye for the ladies is.  The relaxed groove of this song tells it all.  There really isn't much else to it; he confesses "I'm a girl watcher, / I'm a girl watcher," then defines it for us -- "Watching girls go by / My oh my." (As if we couldn't have guessed what being a girl watcher entails.) The best part, though, is when he sings, "Here comes one now," then falls silent for a jazzy little interval of drums and bass, turning his attention to the babe in question, with a few happy grunts and groans of approval. It's like he's admiring a sunset, or a great work of art.  Who could argue with that?

To be perfectly honest, as a teen I got creeped out by "Want Ads" too, despite its female perspective. Released in 1971, it was such a monster hit for the girl group Honey Cone that they put it on two albums in the same year, Sweet Replies and Soulful Tapestry. You couldn't miss that brassy opening, as Edna Wright chants, "Wanted: Young man single and free / Experience in love preferred, / But will accept a young trainee."  A woman in proud command of her sexuality?  No wonder it scared me at that age.  

Listening to it again as an adult, I can see now that it's just a conceit --  taking out a personal ad proves she's ready to move on from her old boyfriend.  She's making a sassy deal of it, but I suspect she hasn't really separated yet, and she still wants to hurt him by flaunting her intentions. Like someone changing their relationship status on Facebook, you know? 

The Honey Cone was the star act of Hot Wax Records, which was formed by Holland-Dozier-Holland when they split Motown. They didn't write this song, but its high-concept set-up epitomizes their school of songwriting -- find a metaphor and work it as hard as you can.  There's storytelling in the verses, too, as she catalogs all the ways he's done her wrong (great lyric: "But lipstick on his collar / Perfume on it too / Tells me he's been lying, / Tell ya what I'm gonna do / I'm gonna put it in the want ads . . . .").  And in classic girl group fashion, she's got her sisters there, wagging their fingers in the background.

Don't even bother looking for a story to "Girl Watcher." He mentions how he threw away his childhood toys, but otherwise he's too busy checking out the ladies to consider past or future.  He's totally in the present, reacting to his hormones.  It's the ladies who need a story; there has to be a relationship.  She's not just putting out that ad because she's horny -- it's payback, it's a bid for self-respect, it's hunger for true love. That's the way women see love and sex.

They're both absolute gems, a reminder that one-hit wonders aren't necessarily total flukes. Similar as they are musically, though, they split right down the Mars-Venus dichotomy. My shrink couldn't have said it better.   

"Tell It Like It Is" / Aaron Neville

I finally got to see Pirate Radio the other day -- went by myself to an afternoon showing down in the East Village, only two other people in the theater -- this movie seems doomed for obscurity. I loved it, though. How could I not love a movie with "All Day and All Of the Night" blasting over the opening credits?

Along with all the British Invasion classics on the soundtrack -- the Kinks, the Who, Dusty Springfield, the Hollies, the Troggs, the Tremeloes, the Easybeats -- there was loads of American music of the era as well. I came straight home from the movie intent on downloading Otis Redding's super-soulful "These Arms of Mine." But then I got lost wandering around the archives of early 60s soul; when I woke up, this Aaron Neville song was glued to my brain instead.



Not that I'm complaining. Forget the Neville Brothers; I love Aaron's small-label stuff from the early 60s. Everybody covered this song eventually -- Percy Sledge, George Benson, Etta James, even Otis himself -- but Aaron's original 1966 recording is still the definitive version. Note how the low-fi production values muted Neville's distinctive vocal stutter, so it was just texture instead of an annoying tic.

Aaron's tenor vocal coats this song in caramel, skimming lightly over unstressed words, hitting the main verbs and nouns like a hammered dulcimer. That langorous beat is the ultimate slow dance tempo, yet the lyrics follow the rhythms of conversation (it's only one step from here to Barry White's bedroom murmur). He's speaking intimately to his lover, chiding her: "If you want / Something to play with / Go and find yourself a toy / Baby my time / Is too expensive / And I'm not a little boy." That last line dives right into sexiness; sure, his voice is high as a boy's, but that trembling quaver tells you he's got a man's passion, and he will not be denied.

The saying "Tell it like it is" got picked up as the Sixties wore on, becoming a political catch-phrase, but in this song, it seems like the singer's speaking out not from courage but from desperation. He oscillates back and forth between accusing ("If you are serious / Don't play with my heart / It makes me furious") and cajoling ("But if you want me to love you / Then a baby I will, / Girl you know that I will"). This girl is driving him crazy. He may be playing the lord and master, but she's the one who holds the cards.

In the bridge, he falls back on the tried-and-true carpe diem argument that men have used for centuries to lure a woman into bed: "Life is too short to have sorrow / You may be here today and gone tomorrow / You might as well get what you want / So go on and live, baby go on and live." Horns moan in the background, cranking up the temperature.

So what is it that makes this song so sexy? Sure, there's the emotive tremor of Aaron Neville's vocal, but don't overlook that lagging stroll tempo, the shuffling drums, or those repeated unresolved chords, holding off chord resolution time and again, while desire builds underneath. He's quivering on the threshold, like a time bomb set to go off. Speed the thing up and you lose it; get too raw and raunchy and you've lost it again. Listening to this song, I am reminded that soul music first got its name from the deep emotion it expressed. I grew up on the slick products of Motown -- and I'll never stop loving them -- but man, this is the real thing: A guy, a girl, and raging hormones. That's telling it like it is.

"1-2-3" / Len Barry

Len who? Yeah, that's what I said too. This was the second blast-from-the-past song I heard in the restaurant the other night, after "Baby Now That I've Found You", and I was convinced that at least this one was genuine Motown -- if not Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, then at least the Impressions or the Four Tops.

But no, it turns out that this 1965 soul classic was released by Decca, and singer Len Barry -- born Leonard Borisoff -- was a white guy, a blue-eyed soul man who grew up in a black neighborhood in West Philadelphia. He was originally one of the Dovells, whom you may know from their hit "Bristol Stomp" (for some reason, that got no airplay in Indianapolis, but I know Philly-area folks remember it instantly). Barry co-wrote this song with John Madera and Dave White, although nowadays the songwriting credit legally has to be shared with the Motown hit machine of Holland-Dozier-Holland, who successfully claimed Barry had ripped the song off from a Supremes number, "Ask Any Girl." It does sound vaguely similar -- though nowhere near as close as, say, "My Sweet Lord" is to "He's So Fine" -- but to me "Ask Any Girl" is staid and boring, while "1-2-3" is a juicy number indeed.

"1-2-3" was a Top Ten hit that fall, in both the US and the UK, and even I remember briefly tearing my ears away from the Beatles to dig this song. It was all over the airwaves -- who could ignore it? It percolates with a snappy syncopated rhythm, emphatic slapping drums, echoing back-up vocals, and exultant horn fanfares. Barry's voice has a nice gritty texture, adding urgency and desire to what would otherwise be a well-crafted bit of fluff. It follows that classic Brill Building three-verses-and-a-bridge structure, with parallel imagery in each verse -- counting numbers in the first ("One two three / Oh that's how elementary / It's gonna be"), alphabet in the second ("A-B-C / Fallin' in love with you was / Easy for me"), and simple math in the third ("One and one are two / I know you love me, and oh / Oh how I love you." That's a ready-made line of imagery, which the Jackson Five would exploit a few years later with their song "ABC."

But basically it's a pleading song -- no story, no testifying, no celebration, just a guy intent on the chase. He and the girl definitely aren't together yet, no matter how assured he sounds. In the verse, he promises her (with his back-up friends chiming in) "it's easy (it's so easy) / Like takin' candy (like takin' candy) / From a baby." To my mind, this odd cliche is the very heart of the song -- that's the phrase I remember most. Maybe he just latched onto a convenient turn of phrase, a trite simile for "easy," but it adds all sorts of layers to the song. After all, isn't taking candy from a baby mean? Though he's urging her to take that candy with him, we can't help feeling a shadow of predatory behavior; that's the knife edge this song skates along. Face it; he does intend to take advantage of her -- when he says he wants her to "fall in love," he really means "have sex with me." Still, Barry's vocals artfully keep things more sincere than sinful. He's not forcing her -- he wants her to want it too.

See him in the bridge, a lawyer of love, laying out all his arguments: "Baby, there's nothing hard about love / Basically, it's as easy as pie / The hard part is living without love" -- ah, there a classic rhetorical feint, painting a dire picture of the alternatives. And at the end of the bridge his voice wobbles just so, as he exclaims, overwhelmed by desire: "Without your love / Baby, I would die!"

We know how to count, know our ABC's; this song pleases us by checking off familiar mantras. But that syncopation doesn't play by the rules; the song is full of lagging pauses at the beginning of lines, filled in by horn toots or back-up echoes. In the bridge, he's playing behind and in front of the beat, swinging us into the groove of his passion. We're leaning forward, waiting for him to hit the phrases, longing to hear that other shoe drop. Even though nothing is settled by the end of the fade-out, the momentum of desire has already clinched the deal. She'd have to have a heart of stone to say no.

1-2-3 video

“The Love You Save (May Be Your Own)” / Joe Tex
28 DAYS OF LOVE SONGS

So many of these love songs I've been writing about are sung by the lovers themselves, who're out to woo or wheedle or settle some score -- they're saturated with Vested Interest. But now here for a change is this neglected treasure from 1966. Warning: This has NOTHING to do with the Jackson Five's thrilled-up joyride of a song with the same title, despite the vaguely similar "Stop!" of the Jacksons' opening. No, this is a slow number, a cautionary tale for those who have loved and lost -- a classic example of The R&B Advice Song. Most advice songs involve the singer counseling a friend (think of “Tell Her You Love Her” or “She Loves You”); vested interests still creep in. Not so Joe Tex. He's acting purely in the public interest, accepting the mantle of street preacher, delivering a sermon on the nature of love to whatever congregation he can find.

Apparently, throughout the 1960s Joe Tex and James Brown were locked in a notorious rivalry, ignited (naturally) over a woman. James Brown prevailed -- as a kid I heard plenty of his stuff and hardly any Joe Tex, except for the late novelty "Ain't Gonna Bump No More With No Fat Woman." (Tex quit show biz after his conversion to Islam and died young, of a heart attack, in 1982.) Thanks however to Elvis Costello, who featured this on his 2005 Starbucks Artist's Choice compilation -- a landmark album in my life, for very personal reasons -- I finally came to the Joe Tex party, and now I'm making up for lost time. This guy was amazing, with a slyness and subtlety and vulnerability you never got from the Godfather of Soul.

I love how he turns the ballad tempo into a world-weary tromp, with heavy-hearted percussion and admonishing trombones. Oh, yes, brothers and sisters, gather round, for I know whereof I speak. He's the Voice of Experience, as he establishes in the first two verses—“People, I've been misled / And I've been afraid / I've been hit in the head / And left for dead” (he also says he’s been “abused,” “accused,” “pushed around,” “brutalized,” “given til sundown to get out of town” -- man oh man). With all that suffering, worn into every tremor and creak of his expressive sweet tenor, he's a certified expert on the pain of love.

It all leads up to the chorus: “But I ain't never / In my life before / Seen so many love affairs / Go wrong as I do today.” Check out his masterful phrasing, how he lags dolefully over the words as if shaking his head. Then he puts his foot down: “I want you to STOP,” an abrupt caesura underlined by a twiddle of horns and vibes; “And find out what's wrong / Get it right / Or just leave love alone.” Those are your choices, folks, and he sounds faintly disgusted by all these screw-ups. With finger-wagging vibrato, he warns, plunging darkly into his lowest voice, “Because the love you save today / May very well-l-l-l be your own.” People, you’ve been schooled.

The Love You Save video

“When A Man Loves a Woman” / Percy Sledge

28 DAYS OF LOVE SONGS

Now here it is, the big day, Valentine’s Day itself – so let’s pull out all the stops, with this headlong flight of passion, courtesy of Mr. Percy Sledge. You have to go back to the early 60s to find a song that believes in love like this song does. Sure, it’s not pure and noble love he’s talking about – more like sexual obsession – but the sweeping melody, not to mention Percy Sledge’s soulful delivery, elevates lust to epic heights.

You know you’re in for monumental emotion from the very first notes, with their blaring horns, resonant organ, and ponderous bass. This is the ultimate slow dance, slouching and grinding from beat to beat, each chord shift groaning toward resolution. I remember this song coming on during school dances – one round of dancing this song, and you practically felt knocked up. (Usually I’d wimp out and flee the dance floor.)

“When a ma-an loves a woman,” Sledge trumpets grandly at the outset, flinging his voice into those high notes, pitched just over the key’s octave note. It’s pretty ballsy, how he claims to have the definitive word on love between a woman and a man, on a universal basis, but he’s sure got my ear.

That commanding opener is evanescent, though; right away things start to disintegrate, slip-sliding down the scale, as he stuffs in the details – “Can't keep his mind on nothing else / He'll trade the world / For the good thing he's found.” The rest of that stuff – the crap that besets this man – is inevitable (in other verses he turns his back on his best friend, spends his very last dime, sleeps out in the rain); but somehow all of it means nothing next to the fact that he’s loving with his whole heart. The stately, almost lazy tempo takes this all in stride; it’s the way of the world, and eternal as the pyramids.

For the first three verses it’s all theoretical; in verse four he confesses that he’s singing from his own experience: “Well, this man loves a woman / I gave you everything I had / Tryin' to hold on to your precious love / Baby, please don't treat me bad.” He’s not accusing her, not exactly, but he does have a sickening sense that he’s going to get the shaft.

From then on, even though he reverts to the third person, it’s pretty clear he’s laying out his own situation: “She can bring him such misery / If she plays him for a fool / He's the last one to know / Lovin' eyes can't ever see.” Is she cheating on him? Or, in the final verse, is he the one cheating: “When a man loves a woman / He can do no wrong / He can never own some other girl.” We don’t know; probably even he doesn’t know – that’s how muddled up you get when you’re in love.

Whatever’s going on, there’s pain and heartache here, that’s for sure. But as Percy Sledge sings it, there’s not one minute of blame or regret. He knew coming in that the path of true love wouldn’t be smooth – but it’s still the most glorious thing in the world. And if you can’t get that, then you don’t deserve to be in love.

When a Man Loves a Woman sample

"Love and Happiness" / Al Green

28 DAYS OF LOVE SONGS

The Grammy awards were on TV tonight, and much as I'd planned to switch them off (with a special note to tune back in for Paul McCartney's performance), I had to keep watching when Justin Timberlake started singing a duet with Al Green. Grinning ear to ear, the Reverend Green still can turn on an R&B wail like nobody's business; he just left li'l Justin in the dust.

Well, what better track to segue into Unhappy In Love songs than Green's "Love and Happiness"? Despite the title, happiness is in short supply in the romantic world Al Green's singing about. There's just something so baffled and careworn about his voice as he starts out musing, "Love and happiness...something that can make you do wrong, make you do right..." Well, which will it be? As that funky organ and drums kick in, I don't hear much about happiness -- only "Something's going wrong / Someone's on the phone / Three o'clock in the morning / Talkin' about how she can make it right" -- do we believe her, folks? We do not, and neither does he. Nobody makes a phone call at 3 in the morning unless it's a love emergency -- they're in dire straits already.

"Happiness is when you really feel good with somebody," he goes on; "Nothing wrong with being in one with someone." I agree. But the tension of those stabbing organ chords, that downward swooping guitar riff, the scolding horns, undermine the whole deal.

And a deal it is, an uneasy quid pro quo negotiation: "You be good to me /I'll be good to you /We'll be together / We'll see each other /Walk away with victory." And while they've struck a truce, it could go south at any minute, as he knows all too well. "Make you do right / Love'll make you do wrong / Make you come home early /Make you stay out all night long / The power of love." Love is just as likely to pull apart a happy home as it is to make one.

They say that Harold Pinter's plays are all about the silences between speeches; it's the same thing with those pregnant pauses in the middle of these lines. He goes on preachin' and testifyin', tossing out these vague disconnected phrases -- no storytelling, no carefully constructed argument, he just tosses and jerks around in a rich stew of funky emotion. That inexorable rhythm track slaps on, while the horns percolate and the back-up singers bear witness. Meanwhile Al is moaning, yelping, humming, free-forming over the whole exquisite untameable mess. Answers? He's got no answers to the secret of love and happiness. You were a fool to think he would.

Love and Happiness sample

"The Story of Bo Diddley" / The Animals

Like way too many Americans, I only discovered Bo Diddley through the music of British white guys in shaggy haircuts and drainpipe jeans-- that bomp bomp-bomp da-bomp beat still makes me think more of Newcastle than Chicago. Sad but true. And apparently I'm not the only one: Links to the youtube clip of the Animals doing this song have popped up everywhere since Bo Diddley died last Monday.

I suppose I knew the Yardbirds' cranked-up version of "I'm a Man" first -- this song was hard to miss in 1965, though in my musical memory it tends to morph into the Spencer Davis Group song of the same name. (Oh, young Stevie Winwood...) A snappy little number, but it completely missed the laidback sexy confidence of Bo's original. Then there was the Kinks' cover of "Cadillac," but it wasn't until much later that I heard that -- in the early Kinks days I was strictly a singles customer -- and let's be honest, like most of the blues covers on their debut album, it's not all that good. You all know how I love Ray Davies, but a blues singer he wasn't.

The Animals, though, were a different story. Eric Burdon's obsession with American blues leaked into every release the early Animals did, and this song is a crazy fan-worshipping take-off on Bo's first hit, "Bo Diddley," as well as his later song "Hey, Bo Diddley." (The songwriting credit goes to Burdon and Ellis McDaniel, which was Diddley's real name.) That trademark Bo Diddley beat runs through the whole song, pounded out relentlessly by Alan Price on the organ, while Eric -- using his best fake Delta accent, in a sort of talking blues that's damn close to rap -- delineates "the story of Bo Diddley / and the rock 'n roll scene in general." He gives a mini-bio of Diddley; discusses how the payola scandal caused the "death of the rock 'n roll scene" in America; describes the rise of the Beatles, the Stones, the Merseybeats et cetera. It's the best six-minute recap any cultural historian could want.

Then he describes the night he and the band finally met their hero at their home base, the Club a Go Go in Newcastle. I have to believe the evening happened just as Eric tells it: "And the doors opened one night and to our surprise / Walked in the man himself, Bo Diddley / Along with him was Jerome Green, his maraca man, / And the Duchess, his gorgeous sister." The Animals start performing their Bo Diddley material, and Eric says "I overheard Bo Diddley talkin' / He turned around to Jerome Green / And he said, 'Hey, Jerome? What do you think of these guys doin' our material?" [dig Eric's drawling impression of Bo] . . .

"Jerome said, Uh, where's the bar, man? Please show me to the bar...' / He turned around to the Duchess and said, / 'Hey Duch...what do you think of these young guys doin' our material?" / She said, [this time a silly high-pitched voice] 'I don't know. I only came across here / To see the changin' of the guards and all that jazz.'" Priceless.

So now we're holding our breath for the denouement -- and here it comes: "Well, Bo Diddley looked up at me and he said, / With half closed eyes and a smile, / He said "Man," / Took off his glasses," -- it's a gas how Eric draws it out, relishing the suspense -- "He said, "Man, / That sure is . . . the biggest load of rubbish I ever heard in my life!" Only I'm guessing "rubbish" wasn't the word Bo Diddley used.

This song makes me love Bo Diddley, a man with a gift for telling it like it is. It makes me love Eric Burdon, too, with all that genuine enthusiasm just gushing out of him. These Geordies loved Bo Diddley as he deserved to be loved.

"Shama Lama Ding Dong" / Otis Day and the Knights

Flying home from Milwaukee in a post-Nick Lowe euphoria yesterday (more on that to come), I was seated next to an ineffably cool gentleman with long graying dreadlocks, obviously a musician -- the fact that everyone in his party was carrying a guitar case was a dead giveaway. It turns out that he was Gemi Taylor, guitarist for Otis Day and the Knights, en route to Orlando to play a Disney World gig. Ever since our delightful plane conversation I've had this song in my head -- no, not "Shout", which is the song Otis sings in the famous toga party scene in Animal House, but the one they sing later in the film, in the roadhouse scene, where Boon ecstatically greets the singer with the famous line, "Otis -- my man!"

Otis Day and the Knights, it turns out, was a band concocted specifically for the movie; DeWayne Jessie was an actor hired to play Otis, who'd never even sung professionally before. (I haven't fully researched this yet, but it looks like someone named Lloyd Williams actually sang the vocals used in the film.) But folks phoned up to offer them gigs once the movie was released, so of course they took them -- and they haven't stopped touring since.

Everybody knows "Shout", a pumped-up Isley Brothers hit that's perfect dance party material. "Shama Lama Ding Dong" is much mellower, with a groove just dripping with honey. I now learn that it was originally written by Otis Redding, which makes perfect sense -- that cha-cha rhythm, the supple melody, were Redding's stock in trade. But what I most love about this song is its light-hearted lyrics, which half the time seem to mean nothing at all: "Cause you shama lama / In the rama lama ding dong / Baby, you put the ooh mau mau (oh, oh, oh, oh) / Back into my smile child." Do "shama lama" and "rama lama" mean something specific in street slang? Does it matter? You can imagine what he means, and it's best left unspoken.

You almost have to dance, working your way into that bridge: "That is why / That is why-y-y / You are my sugar dooby doo." I love how Otis cascades over those extra syllables in the "why's." This thing is just so damn smooth it hurts.

Shama Lama Ding Dong sample

"Crying Time" / Ray Charles

And while I'm down there in the vault, I have to pay homage to this 1966 track by the master, Ray Charles. (For the record: I was a Ray Charles fan long before that movie Ray came out.)This was always my favorite hit of his, even when I was a kid. It never occurred to me, of course, that as a black R&B artist he shouldn't sound so much like a country & western crooner (in fact the song was recorded first by Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, but I didn't know that). It certainly never occurred to me that the track was loaded with schmaltzy strings, in a way that no self-respecting R&B song ever should have been. All I knew was that the song was supposed to be about lonesomeness and heartbreak, and it simply oozed lonesomeness and heartbreak. It got the job done.

I love the hesitant way he launches into those first few notes, like he can't bear to broach the subject with his woman: "Oh oh it's cryin' time again, / You're gonna leave me." There's something sweet about how much attention he's been paying to the signs, too -- "I can see that faraway look in your eyes / I can tell by the way you hold me darlin' / Oooh / That it won't be long before it's cryin' time." Those woozy harmonies on "faraway" and "I can tell" are so grinding, so miserable -- so perfect.

He lets a velvety hoarseness creep into his voice as he pleadingly repeats all the old adages, with that mocking little back-up echo: "Now they say that absence makes the heart grow fonder (fonder)/ And that tears are only rain to make love grow / Well my love for you could never grow no stronger (stronger) / If I lived to be a hundred years old." He makes himself sound about a hundred years old, too, weary and croaking and worn out. Ray Charles was such an expressive singer, and such a storyteller, he never forgot what the song was about.

Just hear how he begins to fumble the rhythm as he regretfully reminds her of what she's done: "Now you say you've found someone that you love better (better) / That's the way it's happened every time before / And as sure as the sun comes up tomorrow ('morrow) / Cryin' time will start when you walk out the door." She should feel guilty, she really should, and yeah, he's playing for sympathy. But he's also feeling doggone sorry for himself -- and he should.

We don't know anything about this woman, why he loves her, where they've been together (except that she's left him before, and come back, apparently). We're in the moment with him, negotiating as hard as he can for her to stay. This song is pure cornball emotion -- but Ray Charles never was one to back off from emotion. Let's just go for it; why not? And if it makes you get a little choked up, well, good -- that's the way it's supposed to work.

Crying Time sample

"I've Been Loving You Too Long" / Otis Redding

I saw a fabulous documentary on PBS last night about the history of Stax Records, which got me to thinking Otis Redding thoughts. Every shot of him in that film showed an exuberant smiling face glowing with life and love of the music; all over again I felt sad that he died so young, just when his big crossover success was about to happen.

The Stax sound was tougher, sweatier, and just plain funkier than the Motown I was raised on; the AM radio stations I listened to in Indianapolis were willing to play Stevie Wonder and the Supremes but I sincerely doubt I ever heard this track as a kid. We got nothing, really, until "Sitting On the Dock of the Bay," and by then Otis had already gone down in that tragic plane crash. Ah, well, I wouldn't have known what to do with this song then anyway. It's absolutely drenched with desire and pain and a whole lot of other things that Otis Redding's shivery grit-edged voice could express better than anybody else.

The title's a little misleading -- "I've been loving you too long" sounds like he's bored and ready to give it up, but in fact the full line says "I've been loving you too long / To stop now." This is guy hooked on his woman, hooked bad, and the way Otis's voice pauses, then trembles in agony, you know he's not simply amortizing his investment. There's something almost dreadful about that weary tempo, those hammering piano chords, the dogged shifts from major to minor keys. He CAN'T stop loving her; she's become a "habit" to him, and I'm guessing more like a drug addiction than a Henry Higgins "I've grown accustomed to her face" sort of habit.

And now comes the hard part: she's NOT in love the same way. "You are tired and you want to be free...You are tired and your love is growing cold" -- he can see it all too well. It's killing him. So he's here, putting EVERYTHING on the line to hold onto her. If this doesn't justify a crescendo of Memphis horns, I don't know what would.

I love how Otis backs off some of those lyrics, as if he's in too much pain to face it (even the guitar seems to flinch and get tentative). He wails full force on "My love is growing stronger" then chokes his way through "as our affair, affair, grows old." I absolutely believe him when he testifies "Don't make me stop now / No baby / I'm down on my knees / Please, don't make me stop now / I love you, I love you, I love you with all of my heart." This is not a song with tight clever lyrics; it's almost like improv, and I picture Otis Redding literally dropping onto his knees, swaying and swooning, getting all worked up the way Sam & Dave or James Brown used to do. God, I wish I'd been lucky enough to see this man perform live.

This song is simply the essence of soul -- an artist's heart and naked essence laid out on stage, no holding back. Even though Stax had a stable of excellent songwriters -- Isaac Hayes among them, before he made it as an artist -- Otis Redding was one of those rare soul artists who wrote his own material (this song he co-wrote with Jerry Butler) and I suspect that helped him pour that extra throb of passion into his songs. Who else could pull this off? I could never buy the Stones' cover, though Chris Farlowe's is suprisingly close to the mark.

It's an undeniably great track, and I'm VERY happy to have it in my head today.

I've Been Loving You Too Long sample

"Again" / John Legend

A couple weeks ago on the Grammy awards show, I was mesmerized by this guy, the coolest neo-soul cat around. (Not to mention having one of the most perfect star names ever.) He didn't appear in the same segment with Smokey Robinson and Lionel Richie, but he might as well have -- in his smart tuxedo, seated at a black grand piano, he seemed the epitome of elegance and melodic gift, an urbane reincarnation of what Smokey and Lionel represented in their heyday. I knew I had to hear more.

This track -- from Legend's second album, Once Again, released in 2006 -- shows that the guy has already figured out that less is more: it's basically just John's jazz piano and his coaxing reedy tenor (you can barely detect a few sustained notes on an electric guitar, an organ moan or two), which throws the focus onto the lyrics. But they're not tidy pop lyrics; he's got a sort of free-floating blank verse thing going on, a welcome contrast to the insistent forced rhyme and meter of rap. Oh, there are rhymes all right -- generally linking significant pairs of words, like "ecstasy / forbidden tree," "motel / familiar smell" --but the verses stretch and contract to accommodate extra words and lines as necessary. It's almost as if the singer is talking to himself, muttering tensely under his breath, trying to figure out what in the hell is going on in this affair.

At first "doing it" stands for the usual (wink wink, nudge nudge) but as the story of this illicit passion develops, "doing it" also refers to the tormented soap opera of fighting, making up, breaking up, over and over, an endless cycle of "fleeting joy and fading ecstasy." "Accusations fly like bullets do," Legend sings wearily; he can see the all-too-predictable pattern by now -- "passion ends, then the pain begins." Yadda yadda yadda. "Damn I love you but this is crazy / I have to fight you almost daily," he groans in frustration. By the time he says, "you feel good as hell to me," it's definitely a double-edged remark.

The chorus is like jazz improv, repeating "I'm/we're doing it again" in all sorts of different permutations, rallying around that trumpeting high note on "again." Texture and emotion are more important here than packaged pop-song structure. Eventually, if you've been listening to it with all your senses, you find yourself tangled up and lost inside this song -- just like the singer is in his sordid passion. If Stevie Wonder's deliciously boppy "Part-Time Lover" is the Before, "Again" is the miserable After. I can't say I've ever been caught up in a tawdry affair like this, but I can sure feel his pain -- and feel the tug of lust that keeps him going back for more.

Watching that Grammy show, I felt a little depressed, I have to admit it -- as if hip-hop and rap have taken over pop music and coarsened everything. But if John Legend is the future of pop music, then I won't slit my wrists just yet.

Listen to it here: http://music.download.com/johnlegend/3600-8558_32-100622965.html

"I'll Walk Away" / James Hunter

I just learned that the term "rhythm and blues" was invented as a music-chart category to replace "race music"; it was understood that R&B singers were black, but on the eve of the civil rights era it seemed better to speak in code. Occasionally you'd get a white singer who'd break the mold -- Alex Chilton, Dusty Springfield, Van Morrison -- but on the whole R&B has survived as a black genre. So when I first heard James Hunter's smooth, velvet-edged voice, why would I imagine he was white? Not only white, but English? No, that voice pouring like honey out of my speakers was kin to Sam Cooke, or James Carr, or Arthur Alexander, Joe Tex, Percy Sledge, or Lionel Richie.

Not only that, his songs are such pitch-perfect recreations of the classic R&B groove that you'd swear they were all covers, though most of them -- in fact everything on his stellar 2006 album, People Gonna Talk -- he wrote himself: finger-snapping charmers with winsome melodies and laid-back lyrics. In a world where R&B is represented by overheated shtreet characters like R. Kelly and Usher, these songs are a breath of fresh air.

"I'll Walk Away" begins at a leisurely stroll, with light whisking drums and a cool bleat of horns on the offbeat; the singer addresses his woman with an ironic shrug, wryly predicting the end of their affair before it's even begun -- "Darling, if ever you refuse me / Like I know you will one day." But in the next verse, he clarifies the situation: "When I feel my chances growing slimmer / And there's every chance they may / When the love light in your eyes goes dimmer / I'll know that's my cue to walk away." That vulnerable blurt on "every chance they may," a telltale tremble on "the love light," gives him away -- yeah, he may have his eyes wide open, but he's a helpless sucker for her all the same, isn't he? It's very endearing, cynical and eager at the same time, and I love how his voice curls around and caresses every line.

Over a jazzy piano in the bridge, Hunter's voice pulls off a shivering sax-like lick on the line "I won't hang around where I'm not wanted" (shades of Van Morrison, one of Hunter's mentors, who joined him for two duets on Hunter's earlier album Believe What I Say). That "I won't hang around where I'm not wanted" is to me the core of this song: Some singers would make it a menacing snarl, but with him it's upbeat and relaxed, a guy who's navigated enough love affairs to read all the signs.

I'm under the spell by now, and by the time Hunter throws in a nimble guitar solo before the second bridge, suddenly I'm wondering -- just hypothetically -- what that guitarist's fingers would feel like on my earlobe, or my throat, or... you know, he could be wrong about this affair; she could be a keeper after all. And if she isn't -- well, he won't have to look too far for someone who is.

www.jameshuntermusic.com