Pass the Hat: Instant Soul Strut Mix
DrWu
4,021 Posts
In the spirit of sharing the love on Valentine's day, I would like to start a board wide mix. There is a simple theme for this project; please post one song that you got early on in collecting that opened your eyes to how much great music was out there waiting for you to discover it.My submission is a single I bought between my junior and senior years in high school, the summer of 1986. I was living in a small town on the Oregon coast washing dishes in a seafood restuarant. Work was long and not much fun. I think I was making $3.15 an hour, minimum wage at the time. My great solace that summer was music. I brought down my portable record player and my collection of 50 or so records. At night I would play Kashmir or the live version of Bad by U2 over and over. I knew only one other person in the town besides my brother. He was a kid a coupler of years older than me who had lived in our neighborhood back in Portland. He had moved away just before high school to live with his mom. Somewhere along the way he had discovered reggae. Tucked up in his attic room he had already managed to accumulate an astonishing collection of roots lps. We smoked a lot of dope as he played me guys like Josey Wales, Sugar Minot, Dennis Brown, Alton Ellis, Augustus Pablo, Scientist, Lee Perry and Joe Gibbs' African Dub series.Coming from classic rock central at the preppy high school I was attending, it felt like I had stumbled into some crazy musical sweat lodge. Every visit was an initiation into the trance world of JA's finest soul music. Pretty soon I was hooked. Of course, it was near impossible to find any music where I was living, much less a copy of "Africa Must Be Free by 1983". My friend told me to look in the back of The Beat magazine for mail order catalogs where I could purchase original 45s from JA. After several weeks, I finally got the hand-typed catalog and discovered that I didn't know any of the artists listed. "Who the fuck is Prince Jazzbo or Dillinger", I thought to myself. Fortunately, my friend hipped me to some reliable labels, Coxsone, Observer, Channel One and Upsetter. I made my picks, sent off $67 and a few weeks later a package of 12 45s neatly wrapped arrived on my doorstep. It was the first time I had ever smelled that musty, warehouse odor that we all know and associate with the hunt. I immediately riffled through the stack; Skatalites "Guns of Navarone", Itals on Ja-Man, Al Campbell on Channel 1, Big Youth "16 dead, 19 gone to Jail" and the Abyssinians "Declaration of Rights", who I knew of from my friend playing Satta Massagana. This would be my first selection. The needle dropped, the cheap organ kicked in over the groove and I was in heaven as Bernard Collins wailed about the injustices of the world. From that first play I knew that I would be looking for the my next "hit" very soon. I still listen to this record at least once a month. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. The Abyssinians-Declaration of Rights
Comments
This is the song that introduced me to soul music.
Amen for this guy!
- spidey
Smokey Robinson: Cruisin
And if that wasn't enough, D'Angelo's version of the same that I accidentally uploaded in the process.
At this time, I had no real idea that there were options outside of what my mom listened to, Willie Nelson (whom I adore now), and what was on the radio, Whitney Houston (whom I was embarrassed to listen to (as illustrated by my behavior) and am embarrassed to admit that I tape stalked her).
My sister was older than me, and ran with drug dealers, punks, convicts and a host of crazy motherfuckers. A few of them saw me as a good enough place as any to leave their influence, and I was blessed with some of the music that not only changed my taste, but changed my life (e.g., Side A: Bathory & Discharge / Side B: Bad Brains ROIR).
I remember a tape that Charlie (this guy from another town who was dating my sister, and he'd drive out to our house and they'd fight--with nowhere to go, and not wanting to drive back home, he'd chill in my room with me) gave me. It was a compilation of Joy Division songs. Joy Division remains, to this day, one of my favorite groups. The cassette had a Kodak Film printed photograph cover (I remember loving the cassette cover so much that I took out the song list and looked at the back for clues as to what it was) of a girl stretched supine atop a tomb, wearing black lace and white face paint. When you're a teenager, this kinda shit is gold. Charlie was a god in my mind. I mean, any dude that can get a girl to get all gothed up and go take pictures in a graveyard is pretty fucking cool, right?
This music, to my Whitneyed ears, sounded "bad." Bad, yes, but compelling enough to want to listen to again. It was all a little much. Noisy, dynamic, violent, unpredictable, wrong. "Which is the verse and which is the chorus?" It was these 4 or 5 dudes who wanted to fuck my sister that changed my life. Over the course of a year they hepped me to Nirvana, Scream, Bathory, D.O.A., Rudimentary Peni, Christian Death, Circle Jerks, Bad Brains, Discharge.
All this aside (but considered), the real pivotal moment was on the a-side of one particularly noisy mixtape Charlie gave me: Happy Go Licky covering "White Lines." It barely resembled its predecessor, but there was enough there for me to have that have I heard this before moment. A couple days later my sister is listening to Grandmaster Flash and it hits me. That epiphany when everything in your life appears to you as a connect-the-dots puzzle and you see your hand holding a pen, gliding from the number 1 through the rest of the sequence. Everything, evanescently, that was deposited, surged back. "Hey, this is really something." In all my adolescent excitement, I ask my sister if I can borrow her Grandmaster Flash record (for closer scrutiny in my Whitney sanctuary). Of course, she says "no."
"Fuck you then! I HATE YOU ANYWAY!"
With my sister dumping the dudes who were nice to me and her keeping her crates on lock, it was my up to me to figure it out. There was a ripple, and I was ready to make some waves. I started putting half my lunch money aside each day, and at the end of each week I would go into our local record store and ask the owner if she could order me something? Skinny Puppy, Parliament, ESG, Krokus, Howlin' Wolf, Rites of Spring, W.A.S.P., Lion of Judah, INXS, Minor Threat, Heaven 17, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Gang of Four, Soft Cell, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Big Black, Cocteau Twins, Bob Dylan... My tastes were dilated, not because I was some Great and Knowledgable Seer of All-Things Record-Related, but because I was alone, and reaching for anything I could find. My taste was all new to me, so taking off Bob Dylan & the Band and putting on Front 242 seemed unremarkable to my teenage tastebuds.
Still, it was this HGL song (Charlie wrote, "HGL" instead of "Happy Go Licky" as the band name -- and during the days of being 13 pre-Internet, this made for months of sleuthing) that kept me prowling. No matter how many times I asked, the woman who owned the record store would tell me she had no HGL or Happy Go Licky records in stock. Her distributor had none, and that big book on the end of the counter had nothing listed alphabetically. I figured out Peterbilt was run by the dude from Rites of Spring, who released records on Discord, so I sent a letter to "Peterbilt" c/o Dischord. Months later I get a postcard from Guy Picciotto apologizing for taking so long to respond, but he was on tour with Fugazi, and sorry, HGL was out of print and Peterbilt was now defunkt. Hmmmm. I had found it!
Not to be deterred, I wrote back, thanking Guy for answering, and asking, "Some of your friends must have copies, no? What if you send me their addresses so I can ask them if they'd dub me a copy of the full record," and I inquired as to the other releases on Peterbilt... I waited. Months. Nothing. Well, fuck it, I tried.
One afternoon the mailman threw this huge box over the fence. In it, the entire Peterbilt Catalog, along with a note from Guy:
I've enclosed the 3 Peterbilt releases (I no longer have the sleeve for HGL). These are among my last copies which I just found in a box in our basement -- quite a happy discovery. Anyhow -- if you could send me $5 each...
I went to the post office, got a money order, sent it to Guy, and stopped waiting for good shit to come to me. Instead, I went to it.
Everything I enjoy today--rare funk 45s, skronk jazz noodling, talking LPs, experimental noise, '80s synth rock, Oakland rap--can be traced back to that one song, connect-the-dots style.
I'm extremely grateful for those times, when everything wasn't so genre-specific, and you could hear New Order and Public Enemy and Venom at your friend's pad (or in your sister's soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend's car). That taught me to not be limited to only the things I heard, to not pay attention to genres of fads, to be constantly curious.
I wanna dance with somebody, with somebody who loves me,
~Bam
p.s. We need more of the stuff that makes Ani DiFranco crossfaded into RZA crossfaded into Big Black seem commonplace
That Rain record has been on my want list since 1992.
Great fucking post.
Being a whiteboy from the city recently exiled to the exurbs at the tender age of 11, I didn???t really get down with my classmates. When the snows were on the ground in that winter of 87, I spent a lot of time sorting through my parent???s record collection. My parents are superb dancers, so their collection had a surprising amount of decent disco (which, at 11, I hated.) your standard soul and pop joints, the classic rock records, Sly, the Who, the Doors, and even a couple treasures, (pop???s Big Hits of Mid America Vol. 1 & 2 on Soma) - essentially your standard smallish collection from a boomer couple.
But that was the same music I had been hearing for those first 10 years. Back in the city on the bus rides from the norside over northeast for school - between the pencil fights and catching clon from sixth graders we got to check out the sounds on the relatively hip busdriver, Lionel???s, ???box???. LL Cool J, Run DMC, and other hip hop was regular, since Lionel, had, you know, that ???cousin in New York.???
So deep in exile, age 11, hating the kids at school, scuffling at lunch and spending my recess in detention in the library stacks, I started checking out the books. I remember a Stienbeck book, probably Tortilla Flats, that I liked, but the specific memory has faded. Monterey played a role, and that???s all I really remember. So, soon after at the video store, with mom, I attached myself to a film called the Monterey International Pop Festival. The box had names I recognized from the parents records. Plus, what the hell, Rad, Animal Chin, and whatever else were already rented. Mom thought it was a little weird, but we got home, and the parents went about their thing, and I plugged the remote into the ancient Fisher VCR and pressed play. I don???t really remember watching much of the film until a funny looking cat dressed wildly was lighting incense or something and talking with an accent I didn???t know.
I watched Ravi Shankar, Alla Rakha, and Kamala do their thing with my jaw on the floor. What. the FUCK. was that?! I ran upstairs and asked my parents who this dude was. They told me that hippies on drugs liked to listen to sitar music because it was long and weird. Sign me up.
A year or two later, hopping the 5 bus with some friends from downtown Mpls to the old neighborhood, skateboards in tow, we made a stop at the Wax Museum/Great American Music. Since none of us had any money, just paper bus transfers, I figured there would be some boosting of a Black Sheep tape or whatever going on in the cassette section, but I popped over to the LPs. I pulled out a pink sleeve with 3 bowing dudes on it, and some ???psychedelic??? script reading ravi shankar. I don???t know how much it cost, I just remember thinking that it was like some Indiana Jones artifact that I would never see again, and I couldn???t buy it. So we left that day, back to the skate spots in the old neighborhood, until I could catch a ride from somebodys mom back out to my suburb.
I found that record a few years later, long after I discovered Coltrane, Miles, JB, George Clinton and all that, but I was still pleasantly surprised when I got that tingle up the back of my neck about halfway through the second side (Dhun ??? Dadra and fast teental). While the fascination with this stuff has waxed and waned in years since, genres and records have been purchased, piled up, imbibed, and sold again, I still pull this out when I am feeling nostalgic. Who knew, hippie???s kids on drugs like sitar music because it???s long and weird, too.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ockecd