Category Archive

by Cousin Geoff

I picked up the latest issue of Waxpoetics today, came home and read it pretty much cover to cover, so I was in a different sort of frame of mind tonight.  Reading that makes you want to reach a little further.  Suddenly, the common stuff doesn’t sound appealing at all.  Not really even James Brown, which seems to always satisfy something.  You read about a boogie-funk DJ from California and get a glimpse of his collection and the mind behind assembling a collection like that, and you realize how far you can take record collecting.

The problem for me and Justin is we have to make money.  That’s why the majority of stuff that we come across that is super rare tends to end up being sold, landing in collections that I read about and envy.  But, you know, every now and then we take a few good ones home for our own personal collections.  But like Max alluded to in a previous post, there’s just so much music that most records I take home I give a quick one-sided listen to and file away. 

So tonight, after reading WP, I really wanted to dig deep.  I went through my rows and crates and pulled out about a dozen or so fairly obscure records that I hadn’t listened to in a while and lined them up next to the turntable, laptop ready to record.  I had such a strong craving for exactly the sound I wanted that most of them didn’t get very far.  I came close to writing about Tower of Power’s first record on the tiny San Francisco record label, but the one record that beat them all was The Spirit of Atlanta’s LP “The Burning of Atlanta”, released in 1973 on the Buddah label.

Produced by legendary composer/producer/arranger Thomas Stewart and backed by a ton of Atlanta session players, “Burning” is just an all-out assualt of the funk senses.  It’s a grand orchestra of high energy soul.

listen to Freddie’s Alive and Well:

By Cousin Geoff 

Aaron Timlin, executive director of CAID, is planning a 192 hour dance-in to protest the unnecessary force Detroit Police used to break up a recent after-hours funk dance party.  John Sinclair would be proud. 

A dance protest seems like no big deal, except that the Detroit Police told them that they needed a permit to dance, and this was one of the things they got ticketed for. Timlin was quoted in the above mention freep article saying, “We’re standing up for what we believe in.  We’d prefer that the police come dance with us.”  Translation: screw you and your laws, we’re dancing, come and stop us.  Totally a page from Sinclair, who once stated that authority figures have no right infringing on the people’s consciousness.

This has gotten a huge amount of attention, with the freep spinning it in favor of Timlin and those who were ticketed at the party.  The comments section on both articles in the freep have a ton of responses, with people taking both sides.  My initial reaction was that this was totally uncalled for, but now I am starting to see it from the DPD’s perspective.  If the police gave the art establishment a fair warning in advance, and they still broke the law, they had every right to crack down - just maybe not with so much force and intensity. 

But let’s break this down a bit further.  Had this been a mostly black party or a gay club illegally serving alcohol after hours, would there have been this much fuss made?  Or did the police treat these white suburbanite hipsters like they would anyone else? 

I am very interested in seeing how the police respond to this act of civil disobedience.  Do they let ’em dance, or will they show these hipsters who runs things in Detroit? 

Maybe Timlin should hand this 45 to the DJ and see where it takes everything:

by Cousin Geoff

New Orleans funk star Eddie Bo says: “Hook it baby!  Now sling it!  Ha!  Good God!  Whooo-weeee!”

This 1969 funk hit on the tiny Scram record label is one of the only ones by local legend Eddie Bo to crack the national charts.  I’m guessing that when Eddie barked out these orders live, people did what they were told, and it soon swept up the nation from The Big Easy.

Hear those New Orleans trumpets coming in?  What a sound.  “Now hook it baby!  I feel it now!  You got it!”

The strutting, helter-skelter tribal-soul drumming of James Black cuts it up.  The bass line guides your booty.  But how did they do it?  “You over there with the big yams! Sling it!” 

Eddie Bo is the New Orleans square-dancing caller.  He’s got the mic, the dance floor is packed.  People are sweatin’ as they hook and sling.  You can’t stop.  You gotta do what he says.  And this isn’t even Part 2 yet. 

So how do you do it?

By Cousin Justin

I started the day yesterday by putting on one of  my favorite shirts, an original  Wu-Wear T-shirt that I got in High School.  You see I am a huge Wu-Tang mark since 36 chambers dropped.  Good albums have been few and far between over the last few years.  That was until Ghostface dropped Fishscale.  I dug that album more than any Wu joint in a long time.  Normally a rap skit is a good oppurtunity to skip to the next track, but the Bad Mouth Kid Skit on Fish Scale starts by Ghost saying “that’s soul right there, don’t touch that radio” in the background a dope ass song is playing that the foul mouthed kid insists on changing, much to the chagrin of ghost.  As soon as I heard the song in the background I used my little Google fingers to try and find out what the fuck it was.  I was unsuccessful and this has been one of those musical obsessions for the last 2 years.  So when I started the day I had no idea my wardrobe decision would have any affect on the cosmos.  Max was comming over later in the evening to hang out and to take a trip to the Record Collector in Ferndale.  I went through the Soul section and picked out a few Soul, Funk, and Disco albums.  One that stood out was the Brother To Brother album.  I took it to the listening station and dropped it on the second track, something I never do, and there it was, the song I have looked for for 2 years.  Needless to say I was pumped.  To keep the karma going, Max and I ended the night with a screening of the underrated Ghost Dog.

Brother To Brother-Vibrations

 By Max Conroy

My struggle lately has been that I have way too much music to listen to.  In the past year or so, I’ve had some incredible resources and have acquired more music than I could realistically listen to.  It’s obviously the result of some sort of compulsion that I have to collect things.  But records are meant to be listened to, and I feel guilty about having some of the best records ever made lying around where I’m only able to dedicate a cursory listen.  Also, my interests wax and wane like the moon, so I’ll have some records that I’ve just purchased and my interest in that genera of music will fall by the wayside, the record filed to be stumbled upon when my interest in that music reawakens.  I guess the solution is to make it a point to try and not acquire anything new.  Don’t worry, readers, I’ll have plenty of stuff to write about.

For some reason, last night I actually went through my CDs and pulled out a huge pile and pretty much froze because it was late, past midnight, and I wanted to listen to everything, but I didn’t want to be up till sunrise.  I’ve been getting back into rock and roll, from jazz fusion and soul and funk.  I had also just hooked my DVD player up through my stereo, so I wanted to be able to watch a bit of something before I went to bed, so I had to make a tough decision, but I sure as hell made the right choice.

Starship, The MC5 at the Sturgis Armory June 27, 1968 is, in my mind, the best document of the MC5 live.  Don’t get me wrong, Kick Out the Jams is a hell of a record, but it doesn’t necessarily represent the 5 accurately with regards to their live show at the time.  They knew that they were going to make a record and had to trim parts of the set, like Black to Comm and various jazz and soul medleys from their set to make a digestible product for the masses (I’m not saying they sold out to the man or anything, they do say ‘motherfucker’ in the first five minutes, before their most commercial song).  The sound on Starship is obviously from someone in the crowd, so this is how it pretty much sounded if you were standing in the Sturgis Armory.  A lot of people don’t realize that soundboard recordings aren’t necessarily the shit because they just capture the sound that’s pumped through the system and not what comes out of it. 

Where is Sturgis you ask?  It’s in southwest Michigan, not far at all from where I, and Cousin Justin, grew up.  The area now is probably a ghost town, but back in the day when muscle cars were king the place was probably still out of the way.  This show catches the 5 playing their set in all its glory in a small town and displays perfectly their mettle.  They didn’t care where they were playing or who to; when they stepped on the stage it was all over; they were going to destroy any other band that dared share that stage, no matter who it was, Cream or Led Zeppelin.

I had to put the headphones on for this one as it was late and I needed volume, so I recommend that you do the same.  Find your headphones and brace yourself…

Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa:

James Brown’s Cold Sweat:  Dig Dennis Thompson’s drumming on this track.

PS:  In my opinion the only other live performace by the 5 that rivals this is Thunder Express, a live set in a European studio.  Go figure, Cub Coda gave it two stars in AMG, haha.

by Cousin Geoff

I’ve talked before about Detroit psych/funk artist Fugi, and his unreleased 1968 Chess LP that was reissued on Tuff City.  As what usually happens when we’re digging something, more stuff sort of turns up.  So I wasn’t too suprised when his promo copy of Red Moon Part 1 and 2 on Grand Junction came out of recent collection, but I was excited.

Fugi is backed by Detroit funk-rock group Black Merda (play on black murder) on these cuts.  The history of the connection between Fugi (real name Ellington Jordan) and Black Merda is shakey.  Some people say that they were a part of the same band, others say that Fugi was the front man on this and the other 45s he put out, which were backed by Merda.  Others say that Fugi wanted to join Black Merda but they turned him down but backed him on the stuff he wrote.  I’ve also heard that Fugi was a promoter for Chess and helped sign other Detroit talent, and this may have played a factor in Fugi getting them to play with him.  Whatever the relationship was, it was Fugi who wrote this psychadelic brand of funk-rock that was considered too out-there at the time to sell to the masses.

Fugi had problems with drugs and legend has it that he wrote the song Red Moon as he drove around Detroit at night while high.  Max described Fugi’s music as “dark, doom funk.” In Detroit in the late 60s, with all that was going on, it’s no wonder that music was produced like this.  It’s quite the opposite from the happy, feel-good Motown sound, but it’s perhaps a more accurate picture of the gritty, grimy, racially tense city.

Red Moon, Part 1:

Part 2:

Syl Johson moved to Chicago at an early age and wound up as Magic Sam’s next door neighbor, as Syl’s brother was Sam’s bass player.  Syl learned to pick the guitar hanging around the west-side Chicago legends and also played a mean harmonica, even briefly touring with Howlin Wolf.  Syl cut a few sides for Federal and later Twinight/Twilight, but after recording with The Hodges Brothers from the Hi rhythm section in Memphis in 1970, he signed on with Hi.  

Johnson’s first record on Hi was this one, 1973’s Back For a Taste of Your Love.  You can definitely hear the classic Memphis Hi sound, as this was put out right around the time when Al Green was the Hi superstar.  Johnson had a slightly edgier, harder sound than Al Green, though still very much in the same genre.  The track Feelin’ Frisky is a good example.   

FOR SALE

We got a request to post the audio of this 45, so here it is.  William Wooten Plays Keyboard on Qualified.  Kevin Carter, the guitar player on the song, now plays in a wedding band entitled Intrigue.  One of the writers of the Floaters tune “Float On“, Brimstone Ingram is credited as an arranger on Games. As far as the sound goes it is not to bad for ‘88.

Games

(She’s) Qualified To Satisfy

by Cousin Geoff

Hamilton Bohannon moved to Detroit in the 60s after Stevie Wonder hired him to be his drummer.  After splitting from Stevie, he capitalized on his bandleading abilites and signed onto Dakar.  Bohannon then put out some incredibly funky dance records in the early to mid 70s, among them this LP titled “Insides Out”.

This was one of the leftovers that I snatched up after it didn’t sell at auction, mainly because it’s on a crazy Korean bootleg label, like the rest of them were (I also took home a Korean pressing of Maggot Brain, so ghetto that it was listed as Funk Adelic on the typewritten label, and filled with misspellings and botched song titles).  But I’ll take this copy of Insides Out until I can upgrade, because it’s a fun, funky, groovy record.  I put it on for the first time while hanging out with my 6 month old daughter, and she bounced and squealed in her Johnny Jump-Up as I played the djembe while the record blasted.  My wife was out so we jammed on and on.  And that is what Bohannon does on this record, he picks up a groove, lays it down and just keeps it going. 

He’s joined by fellow Detroiters LeRoy Emmanuel and Mose Davis of The Counts.  The first side is like one big all-nighter, while the b-side is much more mellow, mostly love songs.  It’s worth it to seek out this album for the a-side though, and you’ll see easily see the inspiration for modern electronic music.  When you’ve got the funk and you’re holding it down, why let go?

Check out Foot-Stompin’ Music (about half of the 7:00 min. + track):

FOR SALE

At first take your reaction to this 45 may be the same as mine, Little Drummer Boy?, fuck that christmas shit.   Once you listen to it though you will want to break out the eggnog and put up a tree.  This is one long slow burn that really gets you ready to trim the tree or tree some trim.  Buy this 45 and play it at your next super cool Xmas party

FOR SALE

Piero Umiliani is an Italian film score composer best known for the song Mah Na Mah Na, later used as the muppet show theme song.  Some wonderful person has posted the scene of the movie, Sweden Heaven and Hell, that Mah Na Mah Na appeared in HERE.  Don’t get lost in that YouTube hole too long as there are a few clips of the movie up.  This is the continuation of that groove along with another great tune in Contestazione.  As long as the Muppet show song has been stuck in my head, I never knew the story behind it, and now that I know I like it even more.  After hearing these two songs I would love to get some more of his work.  As always both sound files are from the 45 that is for sale. 

Beer Vermouth and Gin

Contestazione

For Sale 

I like this one a lot, so much that I haven’t really decided if I want to sell it.  The Six O’Clock News were formed by Rockabilly hall-of-famer and Detroit native James Wayne Boyer.  He originally formed the band Jimmy Boyer and The Newports, who were a top local band in Detroit and Windsor in the early to mid 60s.  Around ‘68 or ‘69, he formed the Six O’Clock News, who recorded only one 45, Train Ride Down Jasper Way / Working On The Road, in 1969 on Novi based label Adell.  After the Six O’Clock News broke up following their brief time together, Boyer went on to play in a few more local bands before touring nationally with a Nashville based group called the Billy Swan Band. 

The A side to this promo copy, Train Ride, is a great song.  Jimmy’s rough and gruff voice give emotion to a hard working railroad love song, backed by a Dennis Coffee-esque funkabilly band.  It’s a fairly rare 45, but it’s unlike many small label Michigan garagers that we come across, the song writing is actually good (and original).  If CCR put this out, it could have been a national smash hit.  As it was with a relatively unheard-of Detroit band in 1969, they produced about 1,000 or so promo copies, sent them out to as many radio stations as they could, and probably received little if any airplay. The records then sat for years, with a few surfacing here and there.  This one came out of a collection we bought recently that was the remnants of a local radio station’s backstock, hundreds of discarded 45s, deemed not popular enough to be worth a damn, forgotten for almost 40 years, until they landed with us to revive them again. NOW FOR SALE

Listen to Train Ride Down Jasper Way:

Note: The B Side on this, the pop-pysch Working On The Road, was featured on the comp “Voyages Into Pop-Psych Vol. II”, and also on the internet radio station/website Technicolor Web of Sound.

by Cousin Geoff

This record was an early, early find for me in my record hunting hobby that has now grown into our mighty Cousins empire.  I can remember it like it was yesterday.  I was out garage sailing, and it was getting late, almost 11:00 AM.  I had been at it since early in the morning, driving around, newspaper close by, digging and scouting and hunting.  In those days, going garage sailing was our main way of finding records.  This was before Cousin Justin and I were even partners. We would just sell under the same name and then get the money for our records. 

So I was out driving, way south of Ypsi, almost to Milan, about to go home and call it quits, but I decided to stop by one last sale and check it out, a total country bumpkin sale and I found this record somehow.  I almost sold it, because it goes for good money, but I liked it so much I had to keep it.  Turns out, it’s still one of my favorite records, especially because of the song I’ve Never Found a Girl.

There’s not much other vocals on the album besides this song, but it’s Marvin and his Uptights blowing feel-good 1969 San Francisco psych-funk until your toes curl.  It’s loud Saturday music, it’s getting ready to have a party at your house music, it’s happy Dragon-Monster Soul music.

Check out the liner notes from the back of the album:

I always said if I ever had the chance to write liner notes for an artist-I would have a ball doing it-I have read a lot of album backs and it seems there is always something interesting to say and use the most in descriptive words from?-funk-and I’d say yeah!  Well now it’s my turn and I do have someone I can testify for-Marv & The Uptights, able to raise a suave, sophisticated, mellow gathering to a high fever pitch-rocking with much Boss Soul-not being sacrilegious, but for those who missed church, this album will take you-giving you that head nodding, toe tappin’, hip shakin’, finger poppin’, soulful feeling-just let yourself go-Marv & The Uptights is mighty funky and how do you really decribe that.  It’s like when you, well you how it is when-uhhhhh-coming up on the-let’s see-I know what it is but I just can’t uhhh, how about funky as barrels of hot asphalt-I think you get the picture-check ‘em out-Marv & The Uptights-and you’ll dig much Infinity.

-Bob White KDIA Oakland, Calif.

Yeah, Bob!  Were you high by any chance when you wrote those notes? 

Check out the song, I’ve Never Found a Girl.  If you like it as much as I do, note that AL Green also does a great version on his Let’s Stay Together album.

by Cousin Geoff 

I wrote about this album about two years ago, but I didn’t include a picture or audio.  I forgot I wrote about it when I was thinking about what to post tonight, but I took the picture and recorded a sample of Gone With Yesterday.  Rather than write about it again, you can just read what I wrote before and listen to the cut.

by Cousin Geoff

The Sun Messengers are one of my favorite local bands.  I’ve written about them a couple times, and cheered them on at Pistons games, where they serve up the funk as the resident house band.

So, I was excited to not only find a 45 by The Sun Messengers that I had never seen, but lo and behold it was another Tigers song to add to the collection.

There’s good parts to this song, like the opening, and the chorus, but the singing is really pretty bad.  The front says it’s The Sun Messengers w/ Tyrone Hamilton and the Bleature Creature Choir.  This Tyrone Hamilton is, I assume, the one singing and it sort of sounds like someone wrote a song about the Tigers and then performed it at a family reunion and the family is too nice not to tell him he can’t sing worth a lick.  I’m guessing that Tyrone Hamilton was one of The Sun Messenger’s friends, and they didn’t have the heart to get someone else to do lead vocals on this track. 

That being said, I really don’t care too much.  In fact, I sort of like it better that it’s kind of bad.  It’s still an awesome song.  The label alone is worth adding to my collection.

What’s that you say, I said the Tigers won again today!

Listen to Tiger Dynasty: