Wigan
Carl Carleton – Competition Ain’t Nothing (Backbeat)
The Tams – Shelter (Probe)
Ambassadors – I’m So Proud of My Baby (Atlantic)
Billy Butler – Boston Monkey (Okeh)
Billy Harner – I Struck It Rich (OR)
Robb Fortune – Crazy Feeling (Now)
Tony Clarke – Landslide (Chess)
Patti and the Emblems – Please Don’t Ever Leave Me (Kapp)
Pat Lundy – Soul and Nothing But the Blues (Columbia)
Felice Taylor – Under the Influence of Love (Mustang)
Parliaments – Don’t Be Sore at Me (Revilot)
Jackie Lee – P-E-R-S-O-N-A-L-I-T-Y (Mirwood)
Platters – With This Ring (Musicor)
James and Bobby Purify – The Last Piece of Love (Bell)
Baltimore and Ohio Marching Band – Condition Red (Jubilee)
JJ Barnes – Sad Day A’Coming (Revilot)
Stagemasters – Baby I’m Here Just To Love You (Slide)
Soul Twins – Quick Change Artist (Grapevine)
Paul Kelly – Chills and Fever (Dial)
Bob Brady and the Conchords – More More More of Your Love (Chariot)
Listen/Download – F16C Radio v.96 – Condition Red – 84MB Mixed MP3
Greetings all.
First off, Happy New Year!
Let’s all raise a figurative (or literal, if you have one handy) glass in the hopes that 2012 will be a healthy and prosperous year for everyone.
Despite the fact that we ended last week – and the year – with a mix (albeit of recycled material) something happened during Christmas week that had me back in the crates again.
I – like many of you – spend a fair amount of my on-line time connected to Facebook. Despite the fact that a lot of people find the application to be a nuisance, I find it extraordinarily valuable in its ability to create a sense of virtual community.
I’m able to log in and interact with family and friends, close and far afield, connect to people of like mind (political and philosophical) and stay connected with other DJs/record collectors.
It has been mentioned here more than once that I first got turned on to some very cool records via Facebook posts.
That said, one of the distracting aspects of the site is the ‘ticker’, which runs highlights of my friends activity, even if it involves people who are not mutual ‘friends’, which is where our little story begins.
A few weeks back I glanced over at the sidebar, noticed the name of a DJ I respect and saw the words ‘Northern Soul’. My curiosity piqued, I clicked on the ticker and read the thread.
What I saw did not make me happy.
Those of you that read the blog on a regular basis will be familiar with the fact that I spent some of my musically formative years (back in the 80s) as part of the NY/NJ garage/mod scene.
While I met many, many very cool people, and had my musical horizons expanded greatly – especially in regard to soul music – there was always a contingent on the scene of people who came at the garage music ‘thing’ from a decidedly primitive/lo-fi angle, not unlike the bug-eyed, knuckle-dragging characters in a Big Daddy Roth cartoon.
My direct involvement with the scene came to an end toward the end of the 80s, but I still have many friends and acquaintances from that period, many of whom stuck with it a lot longer than I did, some all the way into the present.
This is not to say that I gave up on the music I was turned on to back in the day, because I still listen to vintage garage, psyche and pop on a daily basis.
However, the breadth of my musical tastes has widened considerably in the decades since then, and it has become apparent (at least to myself) that I approached the music in question from a more inclusive vantage point (which if you have any interest in this, you can dig into it over at Iron Leg).
I only belabor this point to make another one (look out), which is that there are people out there – the aforementioned primitive/lo-fi crowd, who look at soul much the same way they did garage punk, i.e. with an elevated appreciation for ‘rawness’, which isn’t such a bad thing, unless of course it precludes appreciation (and invites denigration) for anything that rises above that very simplistic criteria.
When I read that Facebook thread, what I basically saw was a group of these people enthusiastically shitting all over Northern Soul (not really including my friend the DJ who took what I would consider a much more measured tack).
Now, as our friends in France are wont to say, chacun à son gout (a phrase I picked up from my old man), which basically means ‘everyone to his taste’, i.e. not everyone is going to dig the same stuff.
Certainly words to live by…
But – big but here (heh heh…) – it is always important to make distinctions between matters of taste and fact, a line that was blurred drastically here, not to mention (to paraphrase Dean Vernon Wormer) that drunk and stupid is no way to go through life.
I understand that many people only dig a certain, wilder ‘flavor’ of soul music which is cool, but to suggest (as some of these people did) that Northern Soul is somehow not soul music, is dangerously uninformed about the music, as well as the Northern Soul phenomenon in general (about which many know little other than the name itself).
Anyone who has followed this blog over the years knows that my definition of ‘soul’ music casts a wide net, reaching from the early transitions from gospel and R&B all the way up into (and including) the disco era. I think that it’s important to realize that soul was (and is) in a state of evolution, influenced my many outside sources, musical and cultural.
There are artists whose careers are of such a depth and longevity that this evolution becomes visible (audible) over the course of their discography.
More often than not though, soul singers, by virtue of the fact that they didn’t get to make very many records, end up being identified with one specific sound (whether or not that specific sound is indicative of their talent in the broader sense).
It is important to note that Northern Soul is unusual (though not unique) in that it is a retroactively formed genre classification, when a certain kind of record (often but not exclusively obscure) was initially gathered and played out by DJs in UK soul clubs like the Twisted Wheel and the Golden Torch to which soul fans gravitated.
No one set out to “create” Northern Soul, but rather the name ended up being applied parenthetically to a group of sonically similar records (listen for the popping snares, sweeping strings, honking baritone sax and chiming vibraphone accents), many unjustly neglected when they were released, that were being listened and danced to in the North of England by a largely white, largely working class audience.
The sound – in brief – was bright, uptempo, imitation-Motown, i.e. pop-inflected, well-produced urban soul.
That Northern Soul is approached differently by most American collectors/fans and DJs is without question. Our experience is almost exclusively second-hand, and as a definable ‘taste’, it is often marginal.
This is not to say that there aren’t any Northern Soul fans out there, but that here in America, the scene as it were has never risen above a level of specialization (as opposed to the original scene in the UK where it was a genuinely popular movement, often placing older records into the contemporary pop charts).
There are certainly regular nights where Northern is prominently spun (I was lucky enough to DJ at one of them last year), as well as several rare soul weekenders, but almost nothing like the UK scene at its peak where thousands of fans would come out on a weekly basis to places like the Wigan Casino (voted the Best Disco in the World in 1978 by Billboard magazine) and the Blackpool Mecca.
This only goes to explaining that I understand that to many people, Northern Soul is at best a curiosity, and at worst hugely misunderstood.
It also bears mentioning that many musical scenes (at least in my experience) are clannish and parochial, in which the denizens of one group find little to like or relate to in those of another, whether it’s soul fans who can’t abide anything funky or primitivos who won’t listen to anything that sounds like it was actually created with aspirations to chart success.
In the end, the point I wish to make, and have endeavored to do so in this space before, is that Northern Soul is not only extremely vital and exciting, but is also, indisputably “soul”.
This is music made by some of the finest singers, producers, arrangers and musicians of the day, and is with rare exception well within the accepted confines of soul music in both style and substance.
The mix you see before you is a response to the uninformed ranting I saw – or at least a brief placed in evidence – that you can download and pass on to the haters in your corner or the world.
The set list of Funky16Corners Radio v.96 – Condition Red is assembled from all over the map, with cuts from Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Georgia, Florida and even that heretofore unsung soulful stronghold of Reading, PA.
There are contributions from some of the finest soul labels of the era, from Revilot, to Okeh, to Chess, Mirwood and of course Atlantic. You get solo singers (like Tony Clarke and the underrated Billy Harner), great harmony groups (like Philly’s mighty Ambassadors) and naturally some of the tightest backing groups of the day.
If there is a connecting thread, aside from the aforementioned instrumental building blocks, it is that these records are to the last anthemic, engineered to grab a floor full of dancers and lift them ever higher (not hard to picture when you’re working with BPMs often in the high 140s!).
So, pull down the ones and zeros, and if you are so inclined, pass a copy on to someone who needs convincing.
I hope you dig it, and I’ll be back later in the week with some more.
Peace
Larry
Also, make sure that you check out the POAC link below (click on the logo)
If you want one of the new Funky16Corners stickers (free, of course) click here for info.
Check out the Funky16Corners Store at Cafe Press
PS Head over to Iron Leg for some very tasty UK Folk Rock.
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