JSngry

And the Del Shannon clip just confirmed a long-standing suspicion of mine. That cat was plian ol' WEIRD.

Musically, yeah, it's pretty, uh... whatever. Although the Eugene McDaniels clip is something else, and in the best possible way. The exhaling of cigarette smoke while singing is sublime. And the trad stuff probably sounds better to my ears now than it would have a few years ago. Hell, it's POP MUSIC, and as such, hey, why not? But it's not the music, it was the directing, especially in the first half. Ray, if all you saw was the last bit, you missed the best stuff. Visual puns and gags out the wazzoo, easily at the level of the best of Kovacs. My favorite - a raucous drum break with the camera aimed fairly close up at the drumsticks, which do not move even a little. WTF!?!?! And lots of camera/editing jokes too. Unlike most of these type movies, I tolerated the music to get to the movie itself. And I was highly entertained!

I thought it was Gene Ammons who was Jewish... Or was that just at Carnegie Hall?

Clark Terry?

What kind of psycho/goof/nutjob kind of a flick was this, anyways? Richard Lester, y'all, RICHARD FREAKIN' LESTER!!!

Understood, Cali, and I'll look for that documentary. You know, I just had a flashback to a classmate of the time, a really funny guy who was in retrospect more than a little "high strung". He let it be known early on that his older bother had moved to California & was involved in the Panthers. At the time, that was kinda like a WOW thing for us white kids (at least the ones who didn't run away in fear ), but now I realize that for this kid, coming to school with us every day and "getting along" might have taken a helluva lot of "acting", and that the "high strung" part of his personality might have been more just "personality". I mention him in this context, because I remember him any number of times spontaneously shouting out "SAY IT LOUD" (just that part of the phrase...) to no one in particular out on the playground during recess. At the time, we thought he was just singing the song becaue it was popular, but in retrospect.... All of this to point out, no doubt unnecessarily, that the movement moved at different speeds in different parts of the country with different rates of success (the area I grew up in is probably more racist today than it was then, a dark, dank, rancid collection of human spirits clinging to the spirit of death thinking that's it'll keep them alive). A moment like "Say It Loud..." seems to me to have been a relatively rare one where everybody could be on the same page at the same time for everybody else to know about, like it or not. And now I'm left wondering - whatever happened to my friend, Randolph Jeffery?

Frank Bank Andy Pandy Milli Vanilli

Well, there's always the albums by the actual Headhunters themselves. I'm more than fond of Straight From the Gate myself. The rest...

To me, that one lags a bit in spots. But when it doesn't, yeah! Two really good live JB sets, from different eras, that nobody talks about too much these days are and The Apollo sets & Sex Machine (only partially truly live, but who knew then?) are justly revered, but these 1967 & 1980 albums more than hold their own in comparison. The earlier side is downright incendiary, and the latter shows that no matter how consistently dreary too much of the 70s studio material had gotten, that JB could still bring it live, even if "it" wasn't quite the same "it" as it used to be.

Cali, you're points are all well taken, and I can't argue with them. All I'm saying is that in my part of the country, amongst people more or less my age at the time (teenagers), that record more or less coalesced and drove home the point that things had changed, and that they weren't ever going to un-change. It certainly wasn't a "defining moment" in cultural identity or anything like that, but it did seem to be one that provided the last push over whatever hump was left as far as taking it to the next phase as far as confronting the white world. In our area, schools were not completely integrated in1968, we still had that quaint "Freedom Of Choice" thing. The African-American kids who were in "our" school (the insanity of providing "choice to all" only to still keep the notion that there were still "yours" and "ours" was apparent to some of us even then, but insanity was the order of the day when it came to trying to avoid integration by "allowing" it...) all publicly practiced the "go along to get along" thing. What went on at home was often totally different, as I found out a little later when my level of social/personal interaction deepened and I got to see how much of a "facade" was still being put up in communities like mine, where integration was mostly at best "tolerated". But once the kids left home and came to school, there was still the "don't make waves" thing going on. That record definitely put a big crack in that facade, and it was a crack that let it be known that this was a "point of no return", and indeed it was. I'll not claim that that record was in any way "new" or "cutting edge" in that regard, but I will claim that it certainly seemed to be the final nail in the coffin of an old way of thinking/acting in the world I was living in, one that let everybody know that from here on out, it was time to get busy looking at how things were going to be instead of how things are, or used to be. Your experiences probably vary (differences between north & south indeed!), but these are mine.

Which one?

Hell, that happens to me damn near every time I leave the house to go to work... Got a copy of the new Nas from my son, btw, and spun it all last night. Good, interesting stuff, and lyrically, a lot of it it sounds like the 21st Century Jazz thread applied to hip-hop. BTW - the JB sample you referenced in another thread is from "Get Up, Get Into It And Get Involved". A tad less obvious, and more sublime for me, was the "After The Dance" sample on one tune (just had a burn, so I can't say which one. Nice! But yeah, if hip-hop is dead, where does that leave Wynton's version of jazz? Post-dead? Never alive in the first place? Alive, but in a world other than this one? All of the above?

Nah, that's just the vehicle for the real argument, which is that they each think that the other one is an asshole.

No. The term Black was in common usage by the time JB recorded "Black and Proud". The term Black was made popular years before JB's record. People who inspired this redefinition were Elijah Muhammad, the Black Panther Party, Malcom X, Muhammad Ali, Angela Davis, Jim Brown, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown and lots more. James, actually, was kind of late to the game and surprised a lot of us when he got on the bandwagon. Where I grew up (semi-rural East Texas), "Black" was considered a "militant" word (look at the list above, and you can see why people light-years behind reality on both sides of the tracks might see it this way). An African-American in those parts who referred to themself as "Black" outside of the African-American community was definitely not the norm. But afer JB's record hit, it was. The previously accepted term in the region, "colored", was over immediately. And it pissed a lot of white folks there off that "those people" would suddenly demand to be addressed in terms of their own choosing rather than accept what was offered. Now, I was only living in one place at one time, but I can't believe that the experience in my region was completely unique.

So James Brown is basically Archie Bell & The Drells super-sized, is that what you're saying?

The reason I find this premise so distasteful is the assumption of the author and, obviously, others by their lists, to associate fame and celebrity with importance. Maybe some people ought to find out about the contributions of people like Benjamin Banaker, Garrett Morgan, Louis Lattimer, Hannibal, Elijah McCoy, Madam Walker, Nefertiti and other great queens and kings of Egypt, Timbuktu and other African nations, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Marcus Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Madam Walker, Marshall "Major" Taylor and too many more to list. All "the top 5 black people" aren't/were not entertainers, athletes and/or Americans. Just because you don't know their names doesn't mean that they have not profoundly impacted the world. Absolutely. And this is why Clem doesn't have a fucking clue. Importance doesn't come from "empowerment." James Brown made black people feel good about themselves. That's fantastic, no sarcasim intended. But James Brown had less than no influence over the way black people were treated on a day to day level. For that, you have to turn to a Martin Luther King, Jr. who put his neck on the line over and over again to procure that liberty for ALL of us. You have to turn to a Thurgood Marshall who sat on the highest court in the land and made the decisions that helped open the door for a generation of American blacks. Civil Rights may have been, on some level, about the right for blacks to feel like human beings, but feeling good and being able to vote aren't on the same freaking level. Was JB a great man? No question. Does he deserve our great love and respect? Of course. Did he single handedly change the world? No, he did not. No more than Ronald Reagan tore down the Berlin Wall by saying, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." There's a big difference between the talk and the walk. JB talked the talk all his life. But even he would admit that he left it to others to walk the walk (unless you can point to JB's arrests during sit-ins). Can't we have a holistic appreciation of all this? Yeah, people gotta walk the walk, but those who inspire the walk and the direction it takes are just as important. The walk inspired by JB was markedly different than that inspired by, say, Curtis Mayfield, and to that attention should be paid and credit given. Again - fuel. No fuel, and what does the engine do? The fuel is not the engine, but the engine is not the fuel either. And there are many types of fuel that can produce many types of results. Symbiosis, yin & yang, you need both, can't have a front w/o a back, the bigger the front the bigger the back. And all that.

http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...st&p=596305

Beautiful recollections, Ed. Thanks for sharing!

I know it well. Side Two of the second Apollo album, the 2-lp one. It then goes into the "hey hey, I feel alright" thing and then jack-knifes into the coldest "Cold Sweat" on record. Maybe the baddest LP side in R&B history. Definitely nothing badder.

Damn know-it-all electronic musicians...

Sunset Eyes was PJ-14: http://www.bsnpubs.com/underconst/pacificjazz.html PJ-11 was a Harry Edison side (same source). The Baker thing was PJLP-11, a 10" LP. (same source). Maybe...the single was released before the album and by the time the album came out the title had been changed and the catalog number changed. A difference of 3 isn't all that much, and shit happens. Or maybe the 45 has a worn label and the "4" looks like a "1" due to wear, or dried vomit. Again, shit happens.

The switch doesn't have to "move", the circuit just needs to be opened. Something can be loose on the inside that you can't see from the outside. Take it apart, open it up, and see what's there. Something's loose.

Imagine a bold motherfucker begging you to hit him, letting out a bloodcurdling scream when you do, and then going on stronger and prouder than before. You think that didn't resonate? Not saying that that was what that was consciously about, but you think that it didn't resonate anyway? And that's just aurally. We're still focusing on the records. If you ever get a chance to see the 1968 Boston WGBH footage ini ts entirety... http://www.thephoenix.com/article_ektid25546.aspx http://www.thephoenix.com/OnTheDownload/Pe...d5-f817a94a8d16 Fuck the "iconic" (i.e. "safe") T.A.M.I. shit (but do it well and do it with love). This is the real deal. Pop culture my ass...

In an uncomfortably high number of cases, the assumption that there is a "deep" to go to is one that I'm having a harder and harder time making. The bar may be set as high as it can stand being set. Of course, that's the beautiful thing about living in a cave - known quantities set the standard, become the standard, and life's a breeze.