I'll Take Care of You, O.V. Wright (1968)

"He's one of the greatest singers that I've ever heard.  He had a tone in his voice that was unimaginable." - the late Memphis music producer Willie Mitchell

Continuing my quest to learn about the music that somehow passed me by, I bring you Overton Vertis (O.V.) Wright.

In the 60s, there were two kinds of soul music - the kind that "crossed over," as it was euphemistically called, and all the rest.  O.V. Wright didn't cross over to the white audience and I didn't know a damn thing about him, despite growing up in the Washington D.C. area, until I heard him singing the otherworldly Eight Men, Four Women (from 1967) on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour a few years ago. They call his sort of soul music deep soul, and with good reason - it is drenched in a gospel tradition, it is gut wrenching, and it is authentic.  As much as I love Motown, that description doesn't fit much of its music. Berry Gordy consciously developed it for a mass audience, and it succeeded in the biggest possible way.

However, black music that was more raw and impassioned was less likely to find champions in the music industry. It wasn't always the case, but the deep soul sub-genre faced challenges in reaching the masses. Its emotional intensity - in both vocals and instrumental backing - was arguably too much for the casual listener. (Not me - I specifically gravitate toward that kind of anguish!)

Thus, depending on where you were, it wasn't easy to follow Wright's recording career when he was alive. It took place in large part in two recording meccas - first Gold Star studios, based in Houston (then the largest city in the South), which was the first enterprise of any heft to make a business of the music of black artists, and then Willie Mitchell's Hi Studios in Memphis. 

Wright began singing gospel in church at the age of six, and such was the quality of his performance that he made an early life as a regular on Memphis' gospel circuit, performing in various groups, the last of which was the Sunset Travelers.  With them, he recorded his first music with the Duke-Peacock label, one of those that rented Gold Star's studios in Houston. (The Duke label had originally been in Memphis but was acquired and merged with Houston's Peacock.)

As typically happens in these situations, someone discovers the gospel singer and starts to imagine him or her in the secular world, and with Wright it was no different.  Songwriter Roosevelt Jamison was instrumental in getting Wright signed to Memphis' Goldwax label, which released There Goes My Used To Be (A-side) and That's How Strong My Love Is (B-side). This did get airplay in some places, especially the B-side, but not long afterwards, Otis Redding covered That's How Strong ..., and Wright's version receded into obscurity.

In conjunction with this, Don Robey, who was the impresario of the Duke-Peacock label, sued Goldwax, claiming that Wright was still under contract to Peacock as a member of the Sunset Travelers. The court concurred, and Goldwax activity screeched to a halt.  Robey started a subsidiary specializing in soul music called Back Beat, and it was then that Wright started to receive some recognition.  But here's where it gets perplexing.

Except for the period between Nov. 30, 1963 and Jan. 30, 1965, Billboard has always maintained two music charts for pop music and R&B. According to Top R&B Singles 1942-1999 by Joel Whitburn, Billboard felt that this time period, during which Motown established itself, saw too much similarity in the two charts due to crossover and so stopped the practice.  However, by early 1965, the British Invasion re-established the gulf. Anyway, I was one of those odd kids who looked at the chart listings in the newspaper each week, and I remember always thinking it peculiar that the R&B/soul and pop charts were separate.  I listened to everything, or so I thought. 

The week of August 28, 1965, Wright's Back Beat recording You're Gonna Make Me Cry made the top 10 soul singles, charting at #6. All nine of the other songs on the soul list - Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, Same Old Song, Tracks of My Tears, Since I Lost My Baby, Baby I'm Yours, The "In" Crowd, In the Midnight Hour, Can't Help Myself, and Nothing But Heartaches, were well known to me and played in heavy rotation on the stations I listened to in Washington/Maryland.  (The pop list for that same week was very different, with two exceptions - the Four Tops' Same Old Song and James Brown's Papa's Got a Brand New Bag each crossed over, landing at #5 and #10, respectively, on that chart.)

What happened to You're Gonna Make Me Cry?  I never heard it - anywhere. How did that happen? I'd have to be able to access the playlists of my stations (I listened to several) to figure that one out, I guess.  It must have been one of those "regional" hits that I keep realizing existed.  

Of the many songs I've listened to in catching up on the Wright canon, I'll Take Care of You (composed by Brook Benton) has really burrowed into the fiber of my being.  The collaboration of Wright and Willie Mitchell reaches a zenith here, in my opinion, one that lasted to the end of his short, unsung life. (Mitchell had produced the Back Beat recordings as well as the Hi Records ones, and their friendship went back to their earliest days.) 

Although O.V. Wright had a profound influence on fellow musicians and his fans alike, his life should have been much longer. He developed a drug habit that resulted in some prison time and poor health, and died of heart failure in 1980, at 41.  When, decades later, two writers and soul enthusiasts, Preston Lauterbach and Red Kelly, realized that Wright had an unmarked grave (Willie Mitchell paid for the funeral expenses, according to his widow, but insurance money for the headstone never materialized), they mounted an online campaign to raise enough money to memorialize him in the manner he deserved.  That commemoration took place in 2008 after funds poured in from around the world.

I'll never know why I was oblivious to Wright's existence when he was alive, but the lapse has now been rectified.

Come 'Round Here (I'm the One You Need), Smokey Robinson & the Miracles (1966)

Now when you need the love he's never shown you - come round here
And when you need some loving arms to hold you - come round here
Now I may not be the one you want
But I know I'm the one you need

If I ever needed proof that music becomes a part of us, I confirmed it a few days ago when I was compiling a playlist for an upcoming Dance Dance Party Party event here in Akron. 

I sensed that a certain soul song from my early teens was straining to break out of my brain, its driving rhythm close by but still lurking just out of reach. I knew it was a song that was somewhat rare, not the biggest hit that this artist had ever had, but recalled that, whatever it was, it had rearranged my molecules when I first encountered it.

My mind kept fixating on Stevie Wonder, and I checked over his early discography, but nothing was jumping out. Then suddenly my thoughts drifted to Smokey Robinson.  That man's been everywhere on my radar screen lately - keynoting at SXSW, guesting on Elvis Costello's Spectacle show, tweeting, singing the heartbreaking eulogy for the Melvin Franklin character in the Temptations miniseries. Could it have been a Miracles song? 

Checking out his early discography with the Miracles, I saw Come 'Round Here (I'm the One You Need). That title stirred the embers of something deep within me, but I still wasn't sure if it was what I was thinking about.  Was it on YouTube?  It was!  And then I clicked on it ...

I'm always rediscovering songs that I once loved and had forgotten all about, but my reaction to this one was intense. To literally excavate something like that from the fiber of one's being produces a feeling that's hard to describe. I doubt that I've heard it more than a handful of times in the 44 years that have elapsed since I listened to the vinyl single obsessively and danced my heart out in my room at the age of 13.  It is probably the most underrated song in the Smokey-Miracles canon.  Now that it's back in my life, I know it will never leave.

As pretty much everyone knows, Robinson was and is a prolific songwriter for himself and the Miracles as well as any number of the Motown fixtures, such as the Temptations, Marvin Gaye and the Marvelettes.  But this song was not one of those.  It was written by Motown's legendary writing team of Holland-Dozier-Holland.  The works of Brian and Eddie Holland and Lamont Dozier, as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame says, "epitomized the Motown sound: a fluid, uptempo style that combined catchy lyrics with the fervor of gospel, the groove of R&B and the polish of pop."

I am guilty of overusing the word "masterpiece," but what can I do?  This is one.  Robinson's near-desperate pleas, half sung, half wailed ... Marv Tarplin's juicy riffs piling on the tension ... the inimitable James Jamerson on bass along with the rest of the Funk Brothers.  All in all, an almost otherworldly synthesis of astounding talent among young men who were the building blocks of the Motown empire that blessed us with, as it was known, "The Sound of Young America."

   

Love Is The Answer, Todd Rundgren and Utopia (1977)

Over the years, we've been served up any number of rock anthems of brotherhood.  Few of them have moved me.  Maybe it's because I don't think most people honestly care about brotherhood in our "it's all about me" society.

But the other day, I happened to hear the soaring voice of Todd Rundgren singing Love Is The Answer with his prog-rock band Utopia on Philadelphia's WXPN, and it brought a tear to my eye.

I've written about the mercurial Todd before - he wears a ton of hats and marches to the beat of his own banging drummer, been there, done that.  But what really interests me is that amazing lush voice of his, coming out of such an unlikely-looking person. Granted, he's looked like many different people over the years.  But none of them seem congruent with what emerges from that voicebox. Where on earth does it come from?  Because it's the voice that gets to me when I hear a song like this (no, England Dan and John Ford Coley did not write or originate it), or any of the great songs he wrote.

It's pretty well known that Todd grew up in the musical melting pot of Philadelphia, and in a recent interview with blogger Gene Myers he explained that in Philly, mainstream radio carried a lot of what was then referred to as race music. One of his early bands, The Nazz, didn't have a lot of original material and performed the music of others including, he said, "Ooh Baby Baby by the Miracles with the full harmonies ..."

Now we're getting somewhere!  Channeling Smokey Robinson - that would certainly explain a lot about the operatic sweetness of his voice. However, I want to know more. So far I haven't come across much that pertains to the singing specifically. Lots on every other aspect of his plethora of talents.  I'll keep looking. 
 
And speaking of those talents, tomorrow in New York City a new class will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. For the 15th year, free spirit Todd Rundgren, the very embodiment of rock and roll, won't be included in that class - and ABBA will. He has been considered, but never made the cut, and I can only imagine what the pro-con discussions at the HOF must be like. While his legions of fans find this unseemly in the extreme, he may not care one whit. Still, as one fan says at the Future Rock Legends site, "Just do it before the Rapture, OK?"
 

Gone Gone Gone, Everly Brothers (1964)

Heaven. I'm in heaven. There's actually a connection between Gone Gone Gone and Richard Thompson.  Just one of the many reasons I love doing this blog.  More on that later.

I never knew much about these boys; their greatest success had largely occurred before I became cognizant of rock & roll.  But their hits were always played on the radio, so they were certainly part of the sonic backdrop of my teen years. I was vaguely aware that they'd had a long period after the 60s where they'd stopped speaking to each other, although they've long since gone into détente. What I didn't know was how influential they were in the overall scheme of things and how many later artists - from Barry Gibb to Keith Richards - freely paid homage to their talents. 

So maybe I shouldn't be surprised that they were in the first class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducted in 1986 by Neil Young, who made no bones about the fact that it was pretty impossible to duplicate the Everlys' harmonies, though many had tried, in his experience. And in the fall of 1964, they were tapped to be on the first episode of Shindig!, which was must-see TV for baby boomers. 

(Just for grins, I searched Twitter before writing this post, to see what, if any, profile they have today in the cyber-conversation. I expected nothing; I got page after page of tweets just covering the past few days.)

This appears to be another case of the talent being in the DNA. Don and Phil Everly were the sons of a Kentucky coal miner who, along with his brothers, perfected a thumbpicking guitar style that became all the rage in their county.  When the family moved to Chicago, the elder Everly brothers continued to ply their trade in the city's honky-tonks. Don Everly grew up thinking that families singing together was just what you did.

Moving further midwest where Ike Everly got the itch to forge a radio career, the sons soon were singing on their parents' live program on station KMA in Shenandoah, Iowa. Ike had taught them to play guitar and they apparently had naturally appealing singing voices. As records began to supplant live shows, the family continued its nomadic existence, landing in Knoxville, Tennessee. 

This put them within striking distance of Nashville and, when they got old enough, they went out on their own, hired by Roy Acuff's publishing company as songwriters. They were befriended by Chet Atkins, who found them enthralling and took them under his wing.  In 1957, songwriters Felice and Boudleaux Bryant gave them Bye Bye Love, a song at which dozens of other acts had turned up their noses.  And they were off ... marrying their splendiferous close harmonies with their rollicking guitar licks into a rockabilly-style musical form that pleased crowds across the land.

Gone, Gone, Gone, co-written by Don and Phil, was a relatively rare (for them) full-out rocker, and they did a bang-up job at it.  It was one of the last songs they recorded that did reasonably well on the charts. I love watching them performing this (and so did the near-crazed go-go dancers in that video!); it reflects the best of them in their heyday. They radiated such joy, cocking their pompadoured heads toward and away from the shared mike, in constant motion from start to finish as they reveled in what their voices could do.  Of course now I realize that they were knee-high to a grasshopper when they learned how to be entertainers, and they were experts at it. 

Gone Gone Gone is a song that has enchanted others, most recently Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, who were bestowed with a Grammy for their efforts (I saw them perform this in concert and, honestly, it was the song I liked the least in their storied collaboration, but whatever ... ).  Circling back to Richard Thompson, though - Fairport Convention loved the song, too, and performed their cover of it for Heyday: the BBC Radio Sessions 1968-69. You can hear 30 seconds of it on Amazon.  I might just have to buy it.      

Someday Soon, Judy Collins (1968)

He loves that damned old rodeo as much as he loves me.  Someday soon, going with him, someday soon.

Today's New York Times has a short piece in which Judy Collins, now 70, explains what she does to keep herself in ship-shape physically and psychically for a life on the road.  So it seems fitting to tip the stetson today to the song of hers I always loved the best, written by the beloved Canadian singer-songwriter, rodeo rider and rancher Ian Tyson, the near-perfect Someday Soon. 

Collins was trained as a classical pianist at a very young age, giving her first public recital at 13. But when she discovered folk music, both of traditional origins and what was coming from the singer-songwriters of the 60s, lyrics and the guitar became all-important to her.  She raised her angelic soprano voice in song and hasn't stopped for almost 60 years.  

Collins was the paramour of Stephen Stills at one time (Crosby, Stills & Nash's Suite: Judy Blue Eyes is about her), and it was he who introduced her to Someday Soon.  Here they are reunited and performing it together on a 1990 TV show Graham Nash had called The Inside Track of which I have absolutely no memory!   

Although she has had a tough life, from everything I've read Collins has worked hard to protect and not squander the incredible vigor she has and the creative gifts she's been blessed with.  She believes music uplifts and heals - she sang Amazing Grace at her son's wedding, her granddaughter's christening and her son's funeral after he committed suicide.  Many people have interpreted that 18th century hymn, but I don't think anyone has done it better than she.  Hers was the voice that introduced it to me, and the one I will always hear in my head when I sing it.

Pipeline, Chantays (1963)

Today I was going to write about some morose seasonal affective disordery thing like Hazy Shade of Winter by Simon and Garfunkel (even though it's sunny for the second day in a row), but then I thought, why wallow in the fact that we have months of crap weather still to endure and instead go for the complete fantasy?  The surf music category!

I've been listening to a lot of early instrumental music lately thanks to a Richard Thompson shout-out to Hank Marvin of the Shadows (about whom I'll probably write another time) and was poring over forgottenhits.com which has lists galore, including the best instrumentals. One I had especially nostalgic feelings for leapt out, so today, Pipeline is on the menu. By the Chantays.  I have no idea who they were/are, but we're about to find out.

According to their Facebook page (because it turns out they are playing together nearly 50 years later and have a need to get the word out!), the song was written by original members Bob Spickard and Brian Carman. They still perform with their original drummer, Bob Welch, and long-time members Ricky Lewis and Brian Nussle.  Growing up in Orange County, California, they formed a band while in high school as boys will sometimes do, and the rest is history. 

If I had my life to live over again, I would have wanted to be a surfer chick.  It would have been a whole other life, and I'd be a completely different sort of person.  Good thing, bad thing ... you decide.  I just know that it's a life that suggests a more carefree existence than the one I have lived or lived when I was young, and why wouldn't that sound sweet any day of the week?

Pipeline is considered to be the first instrumental surf-rock hit, with the Beach Boys' Surfin' Safari (1962) the first with vocals. But the seeds were sown in 1961 by Dick Dale (and the Del-Tones), a guitar shredder who played one of the first Fender Stratocasters through a 15-inch JBL D130F speaker and created the sound that instrumentalists the world over have tried to duplicate, something he described as close to what he heard in his head when he was surfing.  His sonic embellishments were pioneering and, as a southpaw, he did it all while playing his guitar upside down and backwards - without restringing it.  

Dale's Let's Go Trippin' was considered the first surf song ever recorded, but it was only a regional hit - and not in my region. (And "trippin'" did not refer to dropping acid but going on a road trip to find the best surf.)

Pipeline has been a surf rock standard for decades, and isn't likely to die on the vine anytime soon. I played it today for the first time in eons.  It made me happy like it did the first time I heard it as a mere child. Let me tell you, when you're landlocked and surrounded by icicles a foot long, a music-induced surfing high can be very therapeutic.

And now I leave you with this great find:  a 1987 collaboration between Dick Dale and Stevie Ray Vaughn on a cover of Pipeline for the soundtrack of a Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello beach flick sendup, Back to the Beach - somehow this was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental.  Hi-fricking-larious!

 

Seven Days Too Long, Chuck Wood (1967)

If you'd asked me two weeks ago what Northern Soul refers to, I'd have been pretty confident that it pertained to 60's soul music that came out of Detroit and Chicago.

Nice try, but wrong.  Once again, my frame of reference is proving to be rather narrower than it could be, and because I wasn't living in the UK during the 70's, I am now finding it means, in the words of Monty Python, something completely different.

It's become a bit of a magnificent obsession, or at least one song that typifies Northern Soul - and the artist who sang it - has.  It all began when fellow music buff Wade practically accused me of withholding knowledge of Seven Days Too Long from him.  But I was Not Guilty As Charged, because I had never heard of it either.  When I did hear it, I went crazy over it.  And needed desperately to find out why it was nowhere near any radar screen that I could lay claim to.

This is where it gets obsessional.  The song is everywhere online, but as many people commented in many venues, there was next to nothing about the singer, Chuck Wood.  Who was this "soul howler," as he was referred to?  Why such a dearth of information about someone whose song became #10 on the list of 20 Most Popular Northern Soul Songs?  For a research devotée, that was like laying down the gauntlet.  I had to find out about Chuck Wood and the genesis of Seven Days Too Long.  

I can't say I've completely figured it out.  It's a bit of a tough nut.  But with the help of two friends who also get their jollies doing research, J and Sheila, we've gotten closer to it than I believe anyone else ever has. 

It might be easier to tell the story if I start at the end.   

In the 70's clubgoers in the north of England developed a distinct penchant for American dance music that was soul in origin, but not commercial and definitely not Motown.  The rhythm was fast, the dance style involved "stomping," and the most prized songs were those that were by definition rare.  These clubs developed an all-night culture, and attracted frenzied, often drug-addled patrons by the hundreds. Several venues, most notably one called Wigan's Casino, became the hub for and synonymous with Northern Soul activity.

How the American records were unearthed would probably make a story in itself.  Suffice it to say that Seven Days Too Long met the criteria of non-Motown, non-commercial and rare.

Which leads to the next question - why was it rare?  Seven Days Too Long was a U.S. release on Roulette, a multi-genre label that by all accounts was always struggling to find success.  But somehow, with what promotion I don't know, the week of Sept. 16, 1967, the song was dubbed a "regional breakout" by Billboard magazine (though what region it does not specify), and by the following week it was #130 on the Billboard charts.  The week of Oct. 7, it had ascended to #119, and that's the last we hear of it, or at least the last mention I can find.
  
So that takes care of the "rare" part of its being a good candidate for Northern Soul; it wasn't commercially successful.  But it still leaves the question of, who in the hell was Chuck Wood?  Here is what I believe I know about him:

• He was born in Tyler, Texas (the year remains in dispute as far as I'm concerned) but somehow made his way to Los Angeles where he attended Los Angeles City College.  
• His first records were for Warner Bros.  One exceedingly bizarre one called Paula Bunyan can be heard here. 
• We believe that it was customary for singers under contract with WB also to be put under contract as actors, and this appears to be what happened with him. Wood appeared in the Tarzan TV series, in the films Beau Geste and The Sins of Rachel Cade, among many other appearances.
• He looked like this.  I believe this to be him only by connecting the dots between various comments on blogs that he also performed as Big Chuck Wood (and the Woodchuckers), discography lists I've found, and the knowledge that he was, indeed, an actor and would have needed publicity stills.  
• He's also probably the Chuck Wood shown here as a singer in an outfit called the Calimbo Steel Band. In fact, an article about him in a 1966 Call and Post says he "performed for former president Eisenhower in Palm Springs, accompanied by a steel band," so it must be right!  His discography certainly suggests that he was not limited in his styles of music by any means.  However, I don't know for certain if the Chuck Wood on all of these songs is just one person. 
• Is he still alive?  Not clear on that either.  A Tyler Texan named Chuck Wood is dead, but the date of birth just doesn't match up to the other ages that are given in various articles about him - unless he looked decades younger than he really was. 

In any event, I am hoping that more information will somehow be unearthed about Chuck Wood.  Nothing about the song's composers, J.R. Bailey and Vernon Harrell, gives me anything.  Bailey was a former Cadillac; Harrell used to perform with the Coasters. Bailey wrote Everybody Plays the Fool, popularized by the Main Ingredient. Any direct connection they may have had to Wood is unclear, other than that the b-side of Seven Days, Soul Shing-A-Ling, was also written by them.  

And with that, I bring this investigation to a close and move on to some other obsession!