Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  When modern pop exploded in 1966 and ’67, launching a thousand possibilities for future musics, Southern soul music began to turn inward. Motown would tip its hat to psychedelia with the Supremes’ darkly chaste ‘Reflections’ (US no. 2, UK no. 5 ’67), replete with cosmic sound effects, but in the South Sam Cooke’s swan song ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ had become a blueprint for a more sensitised sound. This was tagged ‘deep soul’ and it was an end in itself, where there was nothing else but to simplify, distil, intensify. The more intense it was, the better.

  The rise of soul had been inextricably linked with civil-rights marches and Black Power, which led to an increase in black pride across America as the sixties progressed. There was no longer a need to hide behind veiled lyrics (the Impressions’ ‘It’s All Right’) or to use graphics on record sleeves rather than black faces (the Marvelettes’ ‘Please Mr Postman’, Barbara Lewis’s ‘Hello Stranger’). ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ had been a US Top 20 hit in 1964, posthumously; it had a lyric of great sadness but also one of potential salvation. Sam Cooke had written a song about the black experience for black people; it was genre-defining, not only for its lyric and intense delivery but also for its post-doo wop 6/8 time signature and churchly atmosphere, both of which would be major ingredients of deep soul.

  Ben E. King asked the question ‘What Is Soul’ in 1967. It’s a tough one.1 A gut reaction might involve terms like ‘honest’, ‘authentic’, ‘natural’; these are problematic words in pop because there’s as much emotional truth in the Monkees’ ‘I’m a Believer’ – written by Neil Diamond, performed by session musicians on an hourly rate – as there is in Irma Thomas’s ‘Wish Someone Would Care’.2 Each song can say just as much about your life. Maybe the answer to King’s question lies in the sense of being privy to something secret – listening to a vocal performance so intense that you feel that you’re sharing someone’s private pain and anguish.

  The man who coined the term ‘deep soul’ was a British collector called Dave Godin, a shy man who nonetheless left a large impression on pop. He had gone to Dartford Grammar School, where he’d encouraged a young Mick Jagger to listen to R&B. He then set up the Tamla Motown Appreciation Society in 1964, became the label’s British consultant later that year and described the second-hand 45s he sold to soul fans from Lancashire with a taste for driving beats and basslines as ‘northern soul’ – that stuck, too. He was gentle and private, and found he got the most pleasure from music when it was slow and fervent: ‘Deep soul often seems to me to be one of life’s true blessings, a tonic for the heart, so powerful and honest that it can redeem and rescue.’ For Godin, a classic deep-soul performance consisted of little more than vocal, bass pulse, clipped guitar and rich organ chords. Unlike other strands of soul, energy was funnelled away from the dancefloor and into the performance, which was always central. Take Reuben Bell’s ‘It’s Not That Easy’ – the backing is uncluttered, almost perfunctory, allowing Bell’s anguish to strike as close to your heart as possible.

  If the genre had a figurehead, it was Otis Redding, who had blossomed into the Stax label’s premier star. He was stocky, rather stiff on stage and not obviously handsome, but there was an ache to his voice that sounded like Little Richard in utmost remorse. His torment was reflected in his song titles: ‘Pain in My Heart’, ‘Mr Pitiful’, ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’, ‘Chained and Bound’, ‘Try a Little Tenderness’. Even his up tempo efforts were full of biblical woes. He was an unexpected guest at the Monterey Festival in the summer of 1967 and immediately became a major star. His ‘got-ta! got-ta!’ gospel-fired catchphrase didn’t impress white critics: Redding ‘worked hard’, said Dave Marsh. He ‘strained in achievement, no ribbon for that’. Marsh accepted Redding had cut a pair of fine live albums, but sniffed that both were ‘in front of white audiences, of course’. Redding’s reputation never quite recovered from these attacks of inverse racism: all he had done was to play a pop festival where the white kids loved him, and then he was killed when his plane crashed into Lake Monona in Madison, Wisconsin, on December 10th 1967. Pity poor Otis, unable to defend himself.3 The gloomy seascape ‘Dock of the Bay’ (US no. 1, UK no. 3 ’68) was a huge posthumous hit. Possibly his finest single was a ballad called ‘I’ve Got Dreams to Remember’. It’s underplayed, all sad abandon. Redding was only twenty-six when he cut it but he sounds like an old, old man, alone on Christmas Eve, nothing left but photographs and memories.

  Deep soul rarely had any major impact on the chart, but the exceptions were striking – Percy Sledge’s ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ (US no. 1, UK no. 4 ’66) – happened to be your actual genre archetype: church organ, wailing vocal, minimal brass like a knife through the air. Star quality and artistic value aren’t synonymous, but modern pop being popular entertainment it helps if they go hand in hand, and the gap-toothed Percy Sledge (has any US number-one hit-maker had a less likely name?) was no Hollywood pin-up. He scored a monster hit because ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ was an intense, arresting 45, something that had an extra urgency – even though it shared the airwaves with ‘Wild Thing’, ‘Paint It Black’, ‘Paperback Writer’ – that forced you to stop and pay attention. The budget for the single was so small that a woefully out-of-tune trumpet couldn’t even be re-recorded.

  This was music from the outside – created by, but then opting out of, the modern pop story. We’ll be encountering more genres that feed into and out of pop as the story continues, but deep soul was the first departure, and its presence was a quiet constant from ’66 onwards, as long as you knew where to look. Etta James recorded ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’ in 1967 as the B-side of her US Top 20 hit ‘Tell Mama’; it was picked up by British blues-rock band Chicken Shack and became a spotlight song for their cool-voiced singer Christine Perfect. Deep soul was also the music that David Bowie’s character in ‘Young Americans’ was trying to conjure up when he sang, ‘Ain’t there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?’ It floated in and out of other pop forms, blending with country on Dorothy Moore’s extraordinarily moving, subtly devastating ‘Misty Blue’, a UK number six in 1976 which has some of the best phrasing of any pop single: ‘Listen to me, sweet baby,’ she implores, and you’re caught up in her story, you can’t do anything else. Deep soul also grazed rocksteady on Ken Boothe’s fire-breathing ‘The One I Love’ in ’67, and even touched the cabaret soul of Tom Jones on his 1967 cover of Lonnie Donegan’s ‘I’ll Never Fall in Love Again’ (UK no. 2 ’67, US no. 6 ’68).

  There are only the odd, creased monochrome shots of deep-soul singers like Doris Allen, Barbara West or Danny White; they seem as distant and dusty as the early blues singers, and it’s terribly easy to romanticise them. So unknown are the personalities involved that the first biography of the genre’s one star name, Otis Redding, appeared as recently as 2001. Maybe this is why deep soul rarely troubled the charts, but it provided a fistful of 45s which are the first you should reach for to solve arguments with classical or jazz buffs about the emotional heft of pop music. Here’s a cut-out-and-keep list of songs to listen to on your own, curtains drawn, on a winter night; confront your worst fears, use these songs as therapy: George Perkins’s ‘Cryin’ in the Streets’, Timmy Willis’s ‘Easy as Saying 1-2-3’, Doris Allen’s ‘A Shell of a Woman’, Billy Joe Young’s ‘I Had My Heart Set on You’, Betty Greene’s ‘He’s Down on Me’, Nelson Sanders’s ‘Tired of Being Your Fool’, James Carr’s ‘The Dark End of the Street’, O. V. Wright’s ‘That’s How Strong My Love Is’. Hear Betty Harris’s ‘What Did I Do Wrong’ or Irma Thomas’s ‘Wish Someone Would Care’ and you can understand why people like Dave Godin devoted their lives to it.

  1 Ben E. King certainly doesn’t give us much of an answer – after a few lines about it being ‘deep within us, it doesn’t show’, we soon realise the song is a chat-up line rather than an explanation: ‘Hold me tight, so tight I can’t breathe, can’t you feel it girl? This is soul!’ Atlantic Records issued an answer to King’s question
with a compilation called This Is Soul in 1968 that included Aretha Franklin’s ‘I Never Loved a Man’, Carla Thomas’s ‘B-A-B-Y’ and Otis Redding’s ‘Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa (Sad Song)’.

  2 Irma Thomas’s shocking, starkly intimate ‘Wish Someone Would Care’ had been a US number-twenty hit in 1963. It started with a long wordless wail before Irma composed herself to tell us how she was ‘sitting at home alone, thinking about my past’, leaving little doubt that she was singing from personal experience. A film isn’t necessarily more enjoyable if it’s based on a true story. Likewise, a song isn’t necessarily any better or any more heartfelt, or convincing, because it was written by the singer. You may fancy the power of ‘Wish Someone Would Care’ is enhanced by the knowledge that Irma Thomas had three children and was twice divorced before she turned twenty, yet on the follow-up, ‘Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)’, the performance is tender, even more heartbreaking. It was written by Randy Newman, a Jewish songwriter from a middle-class LA background whose family spent their summers holidaying in Thomas’s home town of New Orleans.

  3 There’s a lot of snobbery in pop. Soul snobbery is a particularly strong strain, and Otis Redding’s is not an isolated case. Take Diana Ross, always seen as the most Broadway-conscious of Motown’s singers. In 1971 she cut a single called ‘I’m Still Waiting’. Ross sings it in an airy, sweet voice; she seems to be telling the audience about her one true love, and that ‘love has never shown its face’ since the day he left her. Yet this isn’t the message that comes across from her performance at all. Instead, we get the feeling Ross has walled herself in; her detached voice – especially on a chillingly blank spoken part – implies that her childhood sweetheart is nothing but a handy excuse, someone to blame for a life of lonely disappointment. Quite possibly the man is a complete fiction. Neither Flo Ballard nor Mary Wilson, her fellow Supremes, could have made the cold, still heart of ‘I’m Still Waiting’, with its jumble of self-denial and self-loathing (‘I’m just a fool’), work as well as Diana. It’s moving and unsettling; it’s a faultless performance.

  24

  I CAN’T SING, I AIN’T PRETTY AND MY LEGS ARE THIN: HARD ROCK

  It’s intriguing to wonder where pop might have gone if the Beatles hadn’t done an about-turn on the brilliant colours and dayglo, utopian dreams of 1967, if they had followed Jimmy Webb’s path rather than Eric Clapton’s. John Lennon’s send-up of the emerging British blues-rock sound on The White Album, ‘Yer Blues’, indicates they weren’t entirely at ease with it, and the album was a big messy mix of different stances, stabs and attempts at ways out of modern pop’s sudden impasse. Still, ‘Yer Blues’ also showed that they didn’t need a weatherman to know that the wind was blowing away from Strawberry Fields, heading somewhere murkier and darker. Down to the Dartford delta. In 1968 the Rolling Stones, finally, became the more significant musical force.

  The turning points had less to do with the Beatles and the Stones than with external factors. In November ’67 the pirate stations which had fed British pop culture since 1964, playing 45s in daylight hours while the BBC broadcast specially recorded light music, were closed down by the government. Radio Caroline, Radio London and a dozen other stations which had been legally broadcasting from international waters, a few miles off the British coast, were put out of business by the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act and replaced by a single station, the state-owned BBC Radio 1. Straight away, even though it took most of the popular pirate DJs with it, this was regarded as the sound of the Man, a line in the sand between them and us. Ergo, the pop played on Radio 1 became unsound to support, which was tough on classy acts like the Bee Gees, the Hollies, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, the Love Affair and Manfred Mann. These were safety-first acts as far as Radio 1 was concerned. The Who, on the other hand, had released their magnum opus, The Who Sell Out, at the end of ’67; unsurprisingly, Radio 1 had hardly been keen on playing a record that glorified the departing pirate stations, and they also ignored Pete Townshend’s next effort, a quite beautiful song about greyhound racing called ‘Dogs’ which stalled at number twenty-five in spring ’68, ending a three-year run of Top 10 hits. Licking their wounds, the Who disappeared for a whole year, returning with the game-changing Tommy.

  For pop radio in Britain, then, experimentation was out. Instead, there were now middle-aged DJs like Pete Murray – who had been on Radio Luxembourg when the very first hit parade was published in 1952 – and former singer Jimmy Young, with his squeaky jingle, ‘What’s the recipe today, Jim?’ No competition, no threat, no danger. Just apple crumble for all.

  Within a few months of Radio 1’s launch came the Paris uprising, the anti-Vietnam demo outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square that spilled over into violence, the Black Power salutes in Mexico. The inarticulate rage of the ’68 generation fizzed around the figure of Mick Jagger. There he was, in Grosvenor Square; that was him, singing ‘Street Fighting Man’ (which the Stones were prevented from releasing as a single in the UK by their nervous record company, Decca), showing which side he was on. Still, these were mere glimpses. Anyone who fought through the loud but woolly vocal on ‘Street Fighting Man’ – a production technique which made the song seem even fiercer, and was later copped by Slade for most of their hits – would hear an ambivalent star rather than a catalyst for revolution. The Stones were content for everyone else to get involved, to get their heads cracked by batons and boots, but they would remain apart, totems for the cause, posters on the student-union wall. Modern pop may have seemed thoroughly politicised at the end of the sixties, but it was a confused jumble of ideologies.1

  These events widened the division between pop and rock. (A truce has only occasionally been called since, but it’s no coincidence that when there has been one – 1978, 1981, 1989 – it has tended to benefit everyone, and modern pop has jumped forward instead of circling, turning to its past or turning on itself.) In 1968 the interdisciplinary hopes of Leonard Bernstein looked to be dashed. The UK album-chart-toppers of 1968 showed a generational battle line (Val Doonican, Andy Williams and Tom Jones up against the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel and Otis Redding) which only became more extreme in ’69 (Ray Conniff, the Seekers and the late Jim Reeves on one side, with Cream, Jethro Tull and the Moody Blues on the other). By cutting out both softness and orchestration – which gave it access to different kinds of emotional presence – hard rock began to gel around belligerent self-pity and bullying cliché. Running away from the conflicts and complexity of modern pop as a whole, the result was that rock entered an anxious cycle of increasing loudness and heaviness.

  The most obvious musical influence on the switch from orchestrated fantasies to heavier roots music was Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding. Dylan had been away from the public eye for almost two years when it appeared at the beginning of ’68. The Beach Boys had been the first major act to throw the dreamscape gears into reverse with their home-recorded, minimal soul album Wild Honey in November ’67, but Dylan’s return, no matter how low-key, was so hugely anticipated that it could hardly fail to be an influence. With its acoustic guitars and light skittery drums, rural myths and sepia country feel, John Wesley Harding instigated a return to the source: folk, country, blues and jazz. It seemed necessarily adult in a world where only the naive seemed optimistic, with its veiled Vietnam references (‘I Pity the Poor Immigrant’) and enigmatic prophecies of imminent doom (‘All along the Watchtower’, ‘The Wicked Messenger’). John Wesley Harding also rejected the urban. Carnaby Street and 1967 Utopia would soon be satirised in a few bitter British movies – The Untouchables, Joanna, The Guru – which only foresaw self-destruction.

  A conservative, self-preservative, back-to-basics stance also suited the Rolling Stones’ situation, post-Redlands bust. The Stones finally emerged from the Beatles’ shadow – where they had dwelt as late as Christmas ’67 with the post-Sgt Pepper prettiness of ‘She’s a Rainbow’ – by reacquainting themselves with the blues that had brought them together in the f
irst place. This time around, they lost the ethnographic librarian stance of ‘Little Red Rooster’ and Brian Jones’s buttoned-up purism. Jones was still in the band but, by 1968, could barely function due to his cognac swigging and chain-smoking of joints – Jagger described his eyes as looking like they’d gone over a lemon squeezer. Aside from the yowling sitar on ‘Street Fighting Man’, Jones’s input was entirely absent from their 1968 recordings.

  Emboldened by having pushed the Establishment to the very brink in the court room, Keith Richards now seized the reins. Catching fire with twin dark party hits ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ (US no. 3, UK no. 1 summer ’68) and ‘Street Fighting Man’, the Stones cut the bluesy Beggars Banquet (1968) and Let It Bleed (1969), which included a cover of Robert Johnson’s ‘Love in Vain’. Tellingly, it sounded like the Rolling Stones rather than a Delta homage, taking the eeriness of Johnson’s song and imbuing it with ’69 nihilism. The louche ‘Honky Tonk Women’ (US and UK no. 1 summer ’69) featured a proto-hip-hop beat2 and found them back on familiar territory, in the arms of a bevy of women. But it was a Let It Bleed album track, ‘Gimme Shelter’, that confirmed their transformation from Dartford upstarts gatecrashing parties in Chelsea to blackhearted soothsayers. They’d seen the inside of a cell, after all.

  This new/old direction can also be put down to manager Andrew Oldham’s departure. They were a blues-rock band before he stumbled across them and they reverted to type when he left. Spearheaded by the Stones and Eric Clapton, a British blues boom emerged in ’68 as the flip side to ’67’s flower power. In ’64 the Yardbirds had been the Rolling Stones’ only real rivals on the R&B scene, largely due to Clapton, their thin-lipped, close-cropped kid guitarist who had a permanent look of suspicion in his eyes. He was also the most technically proficient blues player Britain had yet produced.