RIP General Johnson
DocMcCoy
"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,917 Posts
DocMcCoy
"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,917 Posts
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I referred to him once on here as "the Freeway of soul music," and while that's of course far from the whole picture, the General was always about trying to stay current, and I think it's a comparison he would have liked. A truly original voice, with noteworthy cuts spread across at least five decades. Rest in peace.
For me, he was one of the voices of my childhood. When I was a little kid, I adored those early Chairmen Of The Board singles, and later, I came to the conclusion that what Dexy's Midnight Runners frontman Kevin Rowland didn't nick from Van Morrison, he nicked from General Johnson. So often, you hear about soulmen of his generation struggling to get by once their early success ebbs away, so I'm glad that he carried on working and managed to find an audience for his newer material.
NO SHIT! I didn't find out about this collaboration with Joey Ramone until yesterday:
The video sucks, but the song is surprisingly good!
As for me...I once started a Chairmen Of The Board thread on FB, so you know I'm grieving.
My earliest exposure to the group was strangely enough at the tail end of their run..."Finders' Keepers" (which General didn't sing lead on) was their last hit, in 1973. Right around that time they appeared on Soul Train with their road band performing live, and I assumed for years that they were a self-contained funk band based on that one TV appearance. Later on, I realized they were a singing group with three core members (there was a fourth, but he bailed out fairly early in the game). By the time I was a teenager in the eighties, I found their In Session album in a used store and played it constantly during senior year high school. And Bittersweet kept me going during freshman year college. I became a confirmed fan from then on. General Johnson's desperate-sounding vocals were one major reason why.