Category: 1965-1969

“I Really Love You” (1969) – The Ambassadors * LP: Soul Summit * Written by Jimmy Bishop and Kenny Gamble * Produced by Jimmy Bishop * Label: Arctic * Charts: #123 (Billboard Bubbling Under)

This is the only charting single by Philadelphia’s Ambassadors, and it has an ongoing mystique among soul collectors. They recorded their first few singles on heavyweight Atlantic, but then shifted over to Arctic, which sounds a bit like a wisecrack.  Arctic was a label belonging to Jimmy Bishop who, unlike Kenny Gamble (co-writer), Leon Huff (keyboards), and Bobby Martin (arranger), three future Philly soul VIP’s who worked on this record, opted to lay comparatively low.

“I Really Love You” captures everyone involved learning their craft, or am I not giving them enough artistic credit by saying that? There’s a murkiness and moodiness to the track that has much to do with the backup vocals being mixed way back with a touch of reverb. This gives it the effect of lead singer Herley Johnson being joined in by strangers farther down the street who are strangely aware of, and invested in, his situation. This kind of connection is something young people are more able to conceive of than older ones. The world is smaller, a bit kinder, and distant voices of solidarity seem more believable. (Maybe this is why people like musicals.)

So that’s one crucial part of this record that makes a listener feel wistful. Then again, those background singers could be the voices in Herley’s head – also a moody listening device. The rest of its appeal, of course, has to do with the musicians.

“The Tide Is High” (1967) – The Paragons * LP: On the Beach with the Paragons * Written by John Holt * Produced by Arthur “Duke” Reid * Label: Treasure Isle.

The Paragons’ original Jamaican version of “The Tide Is High” is the most palatable one for me. I, like you, have heard the Blondie version—a number one hit in the US and UK in early 1981—a zillion times, but that’s not the only reason I don’t need it on my desert island. There’s an easy going restraint to the original that gives it a richness in meaning. With Blondie, no calypso horns or steel drums can soften the well-known drive of the vocalist who sings “I’m not the kind of girl who gives up just like that,” who we also remember singing “one way or another, I’m gonna getcha getcha getcha” and “come on, rip her to shreds.” There’s an insistence in Blondie’s remake that gives its radio dominance a sense that we’re continually surrendering and ceding space to it.

The Paragons, on the other hand, are more seductive, with singer and writer John Holt implying that although he’s “not the kind of guy who gives up just like that,” he will bide his time. Even the tide metaphor strikes the right tone, different from what Brutus said in Julius Caesar about there being one big wave in our lives that leads on to fortune, and that if we don’t take it “when it serves” we’ll spend the rest of our lives in “shallows and in miseries.”

This kind of narrow vision took Brutus to the grave not long after he uttered it. He would have done well to consult with an islander, who would have told him that “the tide is high,” but there are many more to come. Is there not an allure to island music, and surf music, for that matter, that implies that the tide is an ever changing thing? And that big waves are not to be feared or essentialized but celebrated and anticipated as long as we breathe?

In 2002, a girl group called Atomic Kitten took the song back to number one in the UK, and it played during the opening credits of The Lizzie McGuire Movie the following year. That it conveys no overtly non-manufactured message only supports the emotional reads I’m getting from the other two. 

“Memphis Soul Stew” (1967) – King Curtis * Produced by Tommy Cogbill * 45: “Memphis Soul Stew” / “Blue Nocturne” * Label: Atco. Billboard Charts: Hot 100 (#33), Soul (#6).

A Texan he may have been, but sax man King Curtis comes off as a top Memphis ambassador on this record. The spoken intro tells us that the soul stew on special contains “half a teacup of bass,” a “pound of fatback drums,” “four tablespoons of boiling Memphis guitars,” a “little pinch of organ,” and “half a pint of horns.” These are musical ingredients, but I don’t know if there’s any better place to experience sound-taste synesthesia. The track gets you hungry.

The great bassist Jerry Jemmott, who played on the 1971 version for King Curtis’s Live at Fillmore West, writes in his Makin’ It Happen memoir about his disappointment that he couldn’t have been the one to have played on the 1967 single, a Top 40 hit. But Tommy Cogbill was the producer, and why would a bassist of that caliber need anyone else? (Cogbill’s involvement also reminds you how much more of a multiracial affair so many of the great Southern soul records actually were.)

But here’s why “Memphis Soul Stew” always finds its way back in my head: At the inevitable times when I realize a stressful situation will work itself out, or not kill anyone if it doesn’t, I hear King Curtis’s voice saying “this is gonna taste all right,” sometimes altered as “this is gonna be alright.”  

The B-side is a notable contrast. The saxophone’s excused itself and everyone else sounds like they’ve had way too much stew.

“Big Sky” (1968) – The Kinks * Written and Produced by Ray Davies * LP: The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society * Label: Pye

Head Kink Ray Davies crafted an exercise in nostalgia as understated as it was grand with the Village Green Preservation Society album, focusing on the real and imagined cultural touchstones of an English upbringing. A certain archness, though, bends his delivery in every song. While it was clear in “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” (1966), for example, that he was poking fun by taking on an aristocrat’s accent near its fadeout, the subject matter in VGPS feels heartfelt if only for its very outpouring. So sportive is Davies’s voice, that you wonder if he’s feeling self-conscious about the project. (His face on the album cover, far right, makes you wonder doubly so.)

“Big Sky,” halfway through, is the biggie, where Davies rolls out God Himself as one of his album’s endangered curios. “Big Sky feels sad when he sees the children scream and cry,” he sings. “But the Big Sky’s too big to let it get him down.” He sounds like an imperious, inaccessible monarch who refers to himself in the third person. Davies once expressed regret over his delivery, and one wonders if he’d have rather sounded more sympathetic, angry, or less affected. 

The band does the rest of the heavy lifting, giving the track all of the pent-up emotion, release, puzzlement, and memorialization the subject calls for. Being so big, the song can be taken a number of ways, a believable consensus being that it rouses the listener’s spiritual awareness. This brings to mind Tolstoy’s Andrei Bolkonsky, who lies inert on the War and Peace battlefield and discovers that “everything is empty, everything is a deception, except this infinite sky.” It’s an observation that sounds at first like mockery or disappointment, but in fact gives Bolkonsky new life, and for this he thanks God, a.k.a. Big Sky.

“Backlash Blues” (live) (1968) – Nina Simone * Written by Langston Hughes and Nina Simone * Produced by Joe René * LP: ‘Nuff Said! * Label: RCA Victor

The Summer of Soul (2021) concert film unearths footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival, the forgotten “Black Woodstock” that ran for six separate nights during the summer of ’69. It’s a concert film rarity that has the power to take viewers through a full range of emotions, from giddy joy to sanctified tears and then to anger. Nina Simone, at her uncompromising peak, handles that last bit, serving it up with an equal portion of awe. “Backlash Blues” is here at full boil, with words by Langston Hughes, bearing the same vocal edge, spoken statement of purpose, and boom-crash piano it had on her ‘Nuff Said! album. This was a live recording done three days after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Her first version of the song, a studio take on her 1967 Nina Simone Sings the Blues album, captured it at a mere simmer.)

In the film, “Backlash Blues” launches Simone’s set, and by the end of it she is working the crowd with lines such as  “Black people…Are you ready to smash white things, to burn buildings, are you ready?…Are you ready to kill, if necessary?” She’s actually reading verses by the Last Poets’ David Nelson, but you wouldn’t know it.

“Swan’s Splashdown” (1966) – Perrey-Kingsley * Written by Jean-Jaques Perrey and Gershon Kinsley (Tchaikovsky uncredited) * LP: The In Sound from Way Out! * Label: Vanguard

On the back cover of this first album by Moog synthesizer trailblazers Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley, the two men appear as studious music scientists dressed in lab coats. The dual meaning of the teen lingo LP title implies that they are also turning music inside out, exposing its inner essence to uncharted modes of interpretation. As Perrey made clear in an Incredibly Strange Music interview, though, he was primarily concerned with giving instrumental music the ability to express humor, something he considered to be a lost art.

Partnered with Kingsley (who wrote the original version of “Popcorn”), his work on this album and the follow-up, Kaleidoscopic Vibrations, demonstrates hard work at the laugh lab, sending up genres and familiar melodies with electronic squitches and squiggles. On “Swan’s Splashdown,” the Allegro Moderato section of “Danses des Cygnes” in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake gets a honked-up dressing down. You will possibly think about that ballet’s duality-themed story of the good swan and evil swan and compare it to the musicians’ story of serious music and unserious music.

Or you may think about Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, where the character Swann, in the fourth volume (“Sodom and Gomorrah”) thinks about the “binary rhythm which love adopts… bearing no close and necessary relation to the woman they love, but pass to one side of her, splash her, encircle her.” You may also wonder if SmashMouth were listening to this before concocting “Walkin’ on the Sun.”

“I Believe in Sunshine” (1967) – A Passing Fancy * Written and produced by Greg Hambleton * 45: “I Believe in Sunshine” / “She Phoned” (Columbia) * LP: A Passing Fancy (1968) * Label: Columbia, Boo (LP)

The only album by this Toronto quintet, who chose a name that implied a short life, had a striking, delicate butterfly on the cover, radiating a sense of hand-crafted independence. The back cover’s song titles and credits appeared in stencil-free characters full of character. Art direction credits go to “Rainbow Ink, incorporating Cannabis Rex and the Pig,” and typography to the Tolkien-inspired pseudonym Fatty Bolger. Its label—unsurprisingly—is a small entity called Boo, but four singles (all on the album) preceded it—surprisingly—on Columbia, the major-est of labels. Still, the music preserves a garage-bound crudity. The opener, “I’m Losing Tonight,” is a keeper for its uptempo libido, while the other standout, “I Believe in Sunshine,” grabs you for its more complex, melancholic layers. It’s written, with undoubtedly cheerful and commercial intentions, by Tuesday Records founder Greg Hambleton (the brother of Ferguson, who also appears on the album and will later replace band leader Greg Price). When Jay Tefler sings, though, you know his winter breath vapors are visible, and you imagine the Canadian sun sinking dark orange behind him at something like 4:30 in the afternoon. It’s teenage music from a realm where sunshine is precious, where not much of it’s left after the school dismissal bell rings. See their band publicity photo on the too-cold playground. Hear how the piano + organ interlude seem to be emanating from an ice cave. The album sequence follows this track up with another Hambleton composition called “Island,” which merges “In My Room” with “I Am a Rock.” “I Believe in Sunshine” gets a further dose of wistfulness from this subsequent banishment to the basement.