Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  As a spiritual leader, though, even Wonder didn’t come close to the Francis of Assisi-like spirit of Curtis Mayfield. Having gently paved the way with the Impressions in the sixties, he went solo in 1970 and proceeded to block out the sun with tales of urban squalor. Don’t worry, he smiled, ‘if there’s a hell below we’re all gonna go’. So Curtis wasn’t as white-media-friendly as Stevie, and didn’t write anything Bruce Forsyth was likely to cover. Sometimes he was all positivity (‘Move On Up’), or at least optimistic (‘We Got to Have Peace’), but mostly his beautiful, cracked, feline voice was now used as a counterpoint to vicious stories: ‘Right On for the Darkness’, ‘Short Eyes’, ‘Hard Times’. By the time There’s No Place Like America Today was released in ’75, he had largely abandoned melody for message.

  With the release of There’s a Riot Goin’ On, the Family Stone’s dense, rambling and rewarding 1971 LP, black politics bled directly into American pop; it debuted at number one on the US album chart and sold half a million copies inside a month. It was in bars, cars, and on the radio in the kitchen. ‘Runnin’ Away’ (‘to get away’) and another US number one, ‘Family Affair’ (‘you’re all broke down’), were a long way from the spirit of Woodstock. Two years on, ‘Everybody Is a Star’ had been inverted – There’s a Riot Goin’ On belonged to everybody as surely as ‘Stand!’ did, but this time nobody was a star. Like the records being made by the solo Beatles, There’s a Riot Goin’ On was the diary of a man raking over his personal troubles, with fans pounding at the door, in an attempt to find and define himself. For connoisseurs of breakdown albums, it was one of the very best, and it made a full-length album from the blueprint of Norman Whitfield’s Temptations singles.

  This was conscious soul, and its best practitioner was Marvin Gaye. Like Creedence Clearwater Revival, he seemed wise in an age of hot-heads by seeing both sides of an argument, not screeching ‘Fuck the pigs’ or settling for black jive speak. ‘I can remember as a child I always kept myself to myself and I always dug nature,’ he told Disc in 1971. ‘I used to fool around with worms, beetles and birds and I used to admire them, while the other kids were playing sports. It was like some strange force made me more aware of nature. Those kids playing sports were also showing love – love for sport. And if we could integrate all types of love into one sphere we’d have it made.’

  His voice was calm, his appearance saintly: ‘I spent three years writing, producing and reflecting. Reflecting upon life and upon America especially – because that’s where I live – its injustices, its evils and its goods. I think if I had to choose another profession I’d like to be a judge.’

  On the cover of 1971’s What’s Going On he wore a black coat, collar turned up against the rain, brow lightly furrowed. Marvin Gaye wanted to alert the world to ‘fish full of mercury’, and how we had to Save the Children. He had spent two years mourning the death of his singing partner Tammi Terrell from a brain haemorrhage in 1969 and had been a lost soul. ‘I did this record not only to help humanity but to help me as well, and I think it has. It’s given me a certain amount of peace.’

  What’s Going On was electrified and politicised, a gentler, more hopeful suite of songs than There’s a Riot Goin’ On whose three attendant singles (‘What’s Going On’, ‘Inner City Blues’, ‘Mercy Mercy Me’) all reached the US Top 10. Curtis Mayfield’s score for blaxploitation movie Superfly, a number-one album in ’72, spawned the bleak US number-four single ‘Freddie’s Dead’, about a coke dealer going for one last job, while Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’ was a black cloud over the dancefloor, and another US number one in ’72. In the fifties the Weavers had been blackballed for their political views; in the eighties anarcho-collective punk group Crass would be conveniently airbrushed from the chart while selling hundreds of thousands of records.4 Yet in the seventies articulate black musicians, established stars, were scoring number-one hits with state-of-the-nation addresses while Nixon was sweating in the White House. I imagine the CIA had a few bulky dossiers on the subject.

  The productions on these records were expansive, symphonies were created from ghetto life, and hope sprang from this new public platform for black politics. Bill Withers, in his butterscotch-coloured sweater, was a more intimate alternative, even if his message was essentially the same on ‘Harlem’, ‘Use Me’ (US no. 3 ’72) and ‘Lean on Me’ (US no. 1, UK no. 18 ’72).5 His voice was warm and homely, and he looked as if he’d be more at home in a garden shed than on stage. Using similarly stripped-back production, Timmy Thomas’s ‘Why Can’t We Live Together’ (US no. 3 ’72, UK no. 12 ’73) was hard to miss; it cut through the airwaves with an ear-piercing one-note organ motif and just a beatbox for company – no guitar, no bass, ‘no more wars, no more wars, just a little peace in this world’.

  There was no message to Funkadelic beyond ‘Free Your Mind … And Your Ass Will Follow’, and neither group name nor song title needed much dissection. Post-Family Stone, they dressed like Marvel-comic characters in the Age of Aquarius and made long, loud progressive and polyrhythmic jams that owed as much to Jimi Hendrix as they did to James Brown. Underpinning the extravagance and silliness was the airtight rhythm section of Billy ‘Bass’ Nelson and drummer Tiki Fulwood. They had originally formed as a nameless backing group in the mid-sixties for George Clinton’s barber-shop harmony act the Parliaments; it was hard to imagine their Perry Como-like roots when you saw Clinton arrive on stage in an inflatable silver car, or heard the 1969 space-age, Temptations-influenced wig-out ‘I Bet You’. ‘We were down in Tunbridge Wells,’ Clinton told Blues & Soul, ‘and just walking down the streets people were stopping and staring. They were even coming out of shop doorways to take a look.’ The wonder is these acid-munching weird-beards got a gig in Tunbridge Wells in the first place. ‘We psych ourselves in the dressing-room before we go on,’ explained Clinton. ‘We do that by singing bull of any kind, or it could be a riff or a harmony we concentrate on. Sometimes we really work ourselves up so much there’s a danger of hurting ourselves.’

  Hard and spacious, the early Parliament/Funkadelic combine – or P-Funk – came closest to a hit with a single from their 1970 album, Osmium. ‘The Silent Boatman’ had been written by County Durham-born Invictus Records stablemate Ruth Copeland, who they backed on tour in 1971.6 It’s a terrible shame she got written out of their story, as Copeland could switch from weeping folk song to full-on Southern-soul lung power, and cut two astonishing albums – Self Portrait and I Am What I Am – with P-Funk backing her. Without Copeland, or someone else with similar pop smarts to ground their eccentricities, they turned into George Clinton’s ever-expanding circus, absorbing and acquiring members of other groups, like the JBs’ Bootsy Collins and the Detroit Spinners’ Philippe Wynne; on records like 1973’s Cosmic Slop they were still a highly sample-delic outfit, a mine of loops and lifts for future generations, but were aimless, eventually grooving themselves into a dead end.

  1972 may have felt like a dawn for black consciousness but this is pop, not politics, and electrified soul’s peak was brief. Five-minute epics like the Temptations’ ‘Papa Was a Rolling Stone’ were soon abandoned, stretched out instead into albums. Isaac Hayes’s prescient Hot Buttered Soul had set the template for this style back in 1969 (just four tracks, two of which passed the ten-minute mark), and record companies sniffed album-shaped profits from the new sound. Following What’s Going On and Superfly came dense epics like the Temptations’ Masterpiece and the O’Jays’ Ship Ahoy, not bad records at all but adding little to the palette.7

  Soul rapidly became as splintered as white rock. By 1973 Gaye had gone back to bed (‘Let’s Get It On’), and Wonder gave the first indication that he could write the easiest of easy listening (‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’). Both were US number ones, so neither the public nor the record companies seemed to mind, but Black Power seemed to be off the airwaves as quickly as it had arrived. A less militant singer would eventually break down the racial barriers of seventies pop; in 1973 he was
already a star. In the unlikely world of teenybop pop was the political phenomenon that Sly Stone and black America had been hoping for – a black Elvis, an artist with the possibilities of turning racism completely on its head. But his astonishing story will come, in a few chapters’ time.

  Meanwhile, the man who set Gaye, Wonder and Mayfield free, helped them burrow underground to bring conscious soul overground, went off the radar completely. The endless recording sessions for There’s a Riot Goin’ On burned him out, and drugs did the rest. 1973’s Fresh was stale; 1974’s Small Talk aptly named. After a twenty-year hiatus Sly Stone finally appeared on stage again in Perugia, Italy, of all places. Now sixty-four, but looking much older, he was wearing a neck brace beneath a high-collared top. It was nothing to do with his excessive lifestyle – he’d taken a fall from the Beverly Hills clifftop where he lived. He was bruised, beaten, broke, but you could still make out he was the carefree catalyst of ’68. ‘I had a plate of food in my hand,’ he smiled, ‘and when I landed I still had a plate of food in my hand. That’s the God-lovin’ truth. I did not drop a bean.’

  1 ‘Dance to the Music’ could be the most sampled Top 10 hit in pop, either used as a bed for other loops or brazenly, as on Primal Scream’s ‘Rocks’ (UK no. 7 ’94); the beat is deathless.

  2 Berry Gordy’s power is revealed by the fact that HDH couldn’t write under their real names, unveiling their own Invictus and Hot Wax labels while hiding behind the Dunbar/Wayne pseudonym. Their talents could stand the subterfuge and they updated the HDH sound for Freda Payne (‘Band of Gold’), Chairmen of the Board (‘Give Me Just a Little More Time’) and the Honey Cone (‘Want Ads’).

  3 Whitfield’s social commentary took the Temptations so far away from their familiar habitat they had to plead with him for a love song, and got it with ‘Just My Imagination’ – another US number one in February 1971.

  4 Crass’s singles were excluded from the chart on the grounds that they were too cheap and therefore contravened BPI rules. Meanwhile, sanctioned major labels sold ‘double singles’ by the likes of Nick Heyward, the Farmer’s Boys and the Teardrop Explodes for the price of a regular 45.

  5 ‘Lean on Me’ was a soulful caress – ‘Call on your brother if you need a hand’ – that would later be quoted in Dexys Midnight Runners’ more agitated but equally moving ‘Plan B’ in 1981.

  6 She dated their guitarist Eddie Hazel, so maybe they split up and she was excommunicated from Clinton’s family. History doesn’t record, and Copeland has since become one of pop’s most elusive figures.

  7 The exception that proves the rule is the Isley Brothers. Veterans who had recorded the original versions of ‘Shout’ in ’59 (covered by Lulu in ’64) and ‘Twist and Shout’ in ’62 (covered by the Beatles a year later), they had a stint at Motown (unsuccessfully at home, but producing two UK Top 5 hits in ‘This Old Heart of Mine’ and ‘Behind a Painted Smile’) before venturing into funkier territory with ‘It’s Your Thing’ (US no. 2 ’69). Always a little late to the party but hugely talented, they drafted in little brother Ernie on guitar in 1973 and sailed off in a psychedelicised direction with ‘That Lady’ and an extraordinary cover of Seals and Crofts’ ‘Summer Breeze’; the atmosphere on their ’73 album 3 + 3 was not unlike Jimi Hendrix guesting on What’s Going On. They scored a UK number-ten hit with the eco anthem ‘Harvest for the World’ as late as 1976, by which time their peers had all moved into disco or been reduced to playing oldies on the chitlin circuit.

  29

  STATE OF INDEPENDENCE: JAMAICA

  The search for new sounds was within and without pop. Folk rock had been hidden in the gorse on an English heath, but there was another whole world out there, beyond Britain and America, for modern pop to explore. People were yearning for something new, something entirely unfamiliar to revive and renew the spark. Mods at clubs like the Flamingo on Wardour Street had been in on a secret as far back as 1963, when they danced to an exotic, imported music they called ‘blue beat’. At the time it seemed like little more than flavouring, like Latin boogaloo, the Cuban-based sound which gave Ray Barretto a one-off hit with ‘El Watusi’ (US no. 17 ’63); Jamaican blue beat’s moment seemed to come and go with Millie’s ‘My Boy Lollipop’ (UK and US no. 2 ’64). Both were an inkling of modern pop’s globalism to come, but Jamaica would make its chart presence felt much more heavily than Cuban or African sounds.

  By 1969 the skinhead movement – working-class youth, some of whom were ex-mods, all of whom were violently opposed to rock’s dancefloor unfriendliness – had clutched Jamaican music to their bosom. Blue beat (known in Jamaica as ska), rocksteady and reggae – these local micro-genres were a parallel world of pop, born in a tiny British colony. In the early seventies the skinheads helped to place this music in the UK charts. With a foot in the door, it quickly worked its way into the UK/US modern pop narrative.

  The island of Jamaica is 145 miles long and fifty miles wide. Its population is roughly the size of Glasgow’s. Safe to say, it punches above its weight as a major pop player. Outside of Detroit, it has produced more floor-friendly music than anywhere in the world; for rhythmic invention, there is no Anglo-American parallel.

  In spite of its remoteness, street glamour and exoticism, Jamaican pop has been largely boiled down to one term (‘reggae’) with one figurehead (Bob Marley). This is like reducing the history of British pop to blues rock, with Rod Stewart as the all-conquering, ale-drinking, feather-cut hero of the story. In reality, Jamaica’s pop path weaves around and away from the British and American models, quite distinct, but just as intricate. And confusing. Its first incursions into the British charts in 1967, for instance, included singles like the Skatalites’ ‘Guns of Navarone’ (no. 36) that were already several years old. Its most influential export – dub reggae – accounts for just one UK Top 10 hit, Rupie Edwards’s ‘Ire Feelings’ (no. 8 ’74). And the man most associated with Jamaican music, Bob Marley, spent his golden years away from the street music of his homeland, honing a mainstream sound that would appeal to rock fans in Britain and America rather than Jamaicans.

  Prior to the early sixties Jamaica’s influence on pop was almost non-existent. The main sound of fifties Jamaica was mento, a close relative of Trinidad’s more widely exported calypso. But jump-blues and rock ’n’ roll records – especially those produced in New Orleans – began to make their way south, wriggling around Cuba, landing in the port of Kingston by the turn of the sixties. This coincided with the urbanisation of the island, with thousands leaving rural areas for the capital. The island’s class divide meant that live bands were beyond the reach of most of the population, so, at the weekend, Kingstonians organised dances in the open spaces called ‘lawns’ all over the city; sound systems – essentially mobile discos – replaced live music. The better the bass, and the more distinctive the sound, the more popular the sound system became.1 Rivalries built up – the most popular were Duke Reid’s Trojan and Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd’s Downbeat. With radios scarce, this was how most Jamaicans heard the new American sounds of the fifties.

  As American pop moved on from rock ’n’ roll and R&B into the Brill Building sound at the turn of the sixties, there was a demand for new R&B material which, if America couldn’t provide it, Jamaica would. Prince Buster, Coxsone Dodd, Duke Reid and Chris Blackwell – whose family had run the Crosse & Blackwell tinned-food empire2 – started producing 45s for the local marketplace, and Blackwell scored the first local hit with Laurel Aitken’s New Orleans soundalike ‘Boogie in My Bones’.

  It was Coxsone Dodd, though, who inadvertently started a revolution. In 1959 he called a meeting with guitarist/arranger Ernest Ranglin and bassist Cluett Johnson in the backroom of the Dodd family liquor store and explained how he wanted a more distinctively Jamaican feel to his next recordings. So, using a mento-style guitar chop to emphasise the off beat, the trio recorded ‘Easy Snappin’’3 and instantly created a local variation on R&B, the brass-heavy, onomatopoeically named ska.

&nbs
p; Dodd and Duke Reid had enough cash to make trips to America and pick up new tunes to cover, but their rivals had to get itinerant work as sugar-cane cutters to get a US visa. Cecil Bustamente Campbell, under the adopted name of Prince Buster, couldn’t even make it as a cane cutter – the dock authorities said his hands were too soft – and so he determined to create his own Jamaican sound. He recorded a song called ‘Oh Carolina’ in 1959 with Rastafarian teenagers the Folkes Brothers which owed nothing to American pop. The boys sang in Jamaican accents; this was rebel music. It was ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ to the ‘Rock around the Clock’ of ‘Easy Snappin’’. When you consider Ernest Ranglin didn’t even want his name on a record because the new rhythm was so strongly connected with the underclass, Buster’s sociopolitical move was incredibly bold; he called himself the Voice of the People, and nobody argued.