This morning I cracked out a Rhino edition Wilson Pickett Greatest Hits and headed out onto the 110 Freeway with it cranked to full volume. It was quite a recognition of a summer that has, thankfully, been slow to get either warm or sunny here in South Bay Los Angeles. After spending much of the overcast and often chilly days mainlining new music by the likes of Chris Connelly, Trent Reznor and Dale Crover, then chasing them back with steady doses of Sunn 0))) and The Smiths, getting into some raw, old-school Rhythm and Blues was more than slightly akin to getting out into the garden and feeling the moist and ancient Earth in my hands.
In other words, good. Wilson Pickett feels good.
Tunes like In The Midnight Hour or Land of 1,000 Dances feel good in ways that most music today doesn’t. Not that a trek through the Wicked Pickett’s discography is better or more important than modern equivalents; no, it’s more to the fact that old-school Rhythm and Blues is simply a product of an era gone by and thus, unpossessed of any such equivalents today*. And though such classic sounds from legendary studio pioneers such as Booker T. and Steve Cropper at Stax Records, Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama or the seventies soul-definers themselves, Philadelphia’s Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff can be doted upon and re-created by artists such as Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse today**, that era of American culture – of big iron cars made in hardworking cities like Detroit; Jazz; the Nuclear family as a ruling paradigm; quualudes and sock hops – is something we as a culture have left behind us. And in leaving those iconic American institutions*** we have closed the door on the pulse that connected us to the powerful ripple in time that was the Rhythm and Blues sound. That’s the good thing about music though – instant time machine.
Wilson Pickett, along with contemporaries such as Otis Redding, Sam and Dave or Booker T and the MG’s, are not what we would necessarily call simply ‘artists’ by today’s standards. The term ‘Artist’ today conjures images of people like Butch Vig, Mike Patton or even that dipshit from the Brian Jonestown Massacre holed up in the studio for days layering vocals, deliberating reverb times or arranging MIDI patches and studio musician arrangements. Pickett, Redding and their boys were ‘Recording Artists‘ – they came into a studio, coaxed the track out of the band and belted out what they’d become known for in person, singing their hearts out as if on stage that moment. Their goal was less producer and more performer, rising to the often impossible goal of capturing the frenetic energy of their live performance (i.e. more than just the voice) onto a small wax circle without the aid of all the tech we have today. This was the essential motivation of Rhythm and Blues before the end of the sixties/ beginning of the seventies brought Phil Spector and Barry Gordy’s influences to a head and people like George Clinton began crafting sound environments, not just songs, for their records. Today everyone does this, and shy of the occasional live album most performers either ante up and begin to think like studio artists or they hire someone else to produce them who does. But in the late fifties and on through the sixties these ideas were baroque to the recording industry as a whole. Companies hired guys like Booker T and Cropper or Gamble and Huff to help make a record as close to the live experience as possible.
What people call R&B today is, for the most part, not Rhythm and Blues. If you take the abbreviation R&B as representative of a bastardized, abbreviated offshoot of the original, sweat-drenched, hand-clapping showmanship that made middle American parents afraid for their childrens’ souls (and virginity) then yeah, we can go with R&B as a term. Just don’t swing the door backwards and abbreviate it when you’re talking about Pickett or his peers. This isn’t a two-way street and to compare any of the great artists of Pickett’s era to any of the milquetoast sponsor-hounds of today, even passively through language, is equivalent to digging up John Lennon’s corpse and urinating on it – his music might not mean as much to you as it does to many, but you still need to have your facts straight and respect him for what he did.
Listen to Wilson Pickett and you hear a lot of astounding things. First, obviously there’s the man’s voice. Good lord, you can hear the straining of his soul vibrating his vocal chords when he really gets into it. And then there’s the old analogue charm – I’m a sucker for the sound of a microphone clipping on analogue tape, that crispy, almost leathery sound where the actual soundwave pushes the tape, as opposed to the comparably hollow sound that usually results as one maxes out the 1’s and 0’s of the digital domain. Pickett’s voice works so well in this regard, because I can literally feel in my back as a tingling sensation when he reaches into the clouds with his voice and the tape saturates. Distortion as a thing of sheer and utter beauty.
Lastly I’d like to point out the direct correlation this stuff has on modern music. Listen to the rhythm section on Land of 1,000 Dances – Hip Hop takes its bounce and strut directly from this. Or Get Me Back On Time, Engine No. 9 – proto funk that came out a year before Funkadelic’s epic Maggot Brain and seems to have influenced it across the boards. Granted by this time the first Funkadelic albums were no doubt influencing Pickett himself, but in the petri dish of soul music creative inspiration works both ways, a la Bowie and Reznor in the mid 90’s.
I tend to migrate more toward the darker ends of the musical spectrum these days, but I’m telling you, digging out the Wilson Pickett always feels like a sonic swim through the DNA of the musical Universe. And it’ll get the ol’ toes a tapping.
Damn.
………………………
* Although Jamie Lidell comes close.
** Not a diss at all – I dig Winehouse and Ronson’s attempts to
re-infatuate pop culture with a little class, even if most of the melodies on Back to Black, a great album, seem so familiar I’m still not completely convinced they weren’t directly derived from old Smokey Robinson tunes.
*** Okay, okay. Quualudes may not have been an institution per se, but then again I know some old-schoolers that would disagree with you about that one.