RIP Idris Muhammad 1939-2014

Drummer par excellence who played with many of the greats - one of his early gigs was playing on Fats Domino's Blueberry Hill. I was introduced to him via Could Heaven Ever Be Like This from his 70s jazz-funk days, a glorious, sparkling track. Unfortunately my cherished 45 copy is a bit crackly nowadays.That would have, no doubt, spurred me on to buy his 1978 album Boogie To The Top, not his finest hour I know, but I've always liked the track One With A Star from that album.

Idris Muhammad - One With A Star  1978

His 1974 album Power Of Soul is conspicuous by its absence from my collection, and I really should put that right.     

He means it, you feel it.

Don Covay deserves better recognition for his services to soul music. He is not mentioned in the same breath as Aretha, Marvin, and the like but he probably should be. His recording career started in the mid Fifties and was pretty much over by the mid Seventies – it terms of released material it peaked while at Atlantic in the mid-late Sixties. Not many of his own recordings charted big so unless you are a soul aficionado you may hardly be aware of him. At the same time, though, you may well be very familiar with some of his songs as he was a prolific songwriter and the stars have sung his songs: Aretha - “Chain Of Fools”, Gladys Knight & The Pips – “Letter Full Of Tears”, Little Richard – “I Don’t know What You’ve Got But It’s Got Me”, The Stones version of his 2^nd biggest hit “Mercy, Mercy” are a few examples.    

Every now and then I have to remind myself of Don Covay’s greatness. I did it last year when I dug out his 1973 album Super Dude I from my collection, played it for the first time in too long, and realised it is up there with my favourite soul albums of all time.

I’m doing it again now. Just recently I acquired the precursor to his Super Dude album. Different Strokes For Different Folks was one of two albums he released with the Jefferson Lemon Blues Band. Recorded in Memphis it is a great mixture of bluesy rock, soul, and funk.

Don has a distinctive voice with a really expressive delivery. His material throughout his career, and on his late Sixties and Seventies albums, has been diverse, running the full gamut of R&B, Soul, and Funk. His songs can be simple, but he often tells stories. He can make you move, he can touch your heart. He is by turns wild and raucous, playful, soft and contemplative. He can rock (and roll) with the best of them, turn it bluesy, and get down deep and soulful.

At all times he means it, you feel it. Go get it!*     

Don Covay – Why Did You Put Your ShoesUnder My Bed  1971

Don Covay – What’s In The Headlines  1971

There is a good summary of Don Covay’s career at All Music.

*Actually Different Strokes For Different Folks  is another of Don’s albums that is not too easy to find. Here you can find all formats and releases listed, but realistically it will need to be vinyl.    

What happened?

This week I have bought albums in four different charity shops, a mix of independents and ‘big’ organisations. In every one of them I had to pay £2 for an album. That represents a 100% increase in price from earlier in the year. What’s going on? They must be in cahoots. At anything up to £1 I would happily take a chance on a record. At £2 I’m thinking twice.

I’m not at all sure I like Boz Scaggs voice but the £2 price tag didn’t put me off buying his 1977 Down Two Then Left album today. There is usually something worthwhile to find on Boz Scaggs albums, and there is a peach on this one. We’re Waiting has the perfect feel for the summer weather we are currently enjoying. There are some strongly reminiscent musical bits and pieces on this track, from the Dan-esque intro, through certain parts of the vocal melody, to the sublime long, long, jam/fade where the synthesiser in particular reminds me of something else. Reminiscent of what though? There are at least three other tracks in there somewhere but I can’t conjure up any of them at the moment.

Boz Scaggs – We’re Waiting  1977

             

Reasons to be bashful

This recent gap in posts here has been the longest since I started this thing. Blogging just seemed to be pushed to the bottom of life’s priority list for a time.

I know I don’t need to justify this silence to you, but in a way I need to justify it to myself. This blog has been a part of my life for over eight years now, have I been just too busy doing other things or is this the end, or the beginning of the end, of this blog – this phase of my life?  

So, here are ten reasons I gave this blog a rest for a few weeks:

1. Our daughter has been in Canada for a year and came home (for a holiday!) for  three weeks before embarking on another year back in Canada. Plenty of family time.

2. Collecting Panini world cup stickers. Yes, like seemingly many hundreds of thousands of adults who should know better, for a brief time I worked myself into a frenzy of collecting and swapping via Ebay and Gumtree to complete my Panini sticker book. (For the record 162 – Mauricio Pinilla of Chile was the final sticker to be, er, stuck in; and this act was played out on Skype so that our daughter - by then back in Canada - could witness it. She is another sticker fan.)

3. Painting kitchen cabinets.

4. Getting the garden in shape – pruning, cutting, and chopping - repeat; and of course there were all those pots to plant up (seems like a long time ago now, but it is only four weeks or so). We then enjoyed sitting in the garden a bit too.    

 

5. Painting kitchen cabinets.

6. Watching the World Cup.

7. A weekend staying with friends in Exmouth.

8. Watching the World Cup.

9. Moving everything in our conservatory elsewhere in the house while I  redecorated it and the roof was replaced. A lot of the things ended up in the hi-fi room which meant the turntable was inaccessible for about 10 days L

10. Painting kitchen cabinets (Yippee! They’re finished at last!). 

   

Sorry if I bored you there. It is a fairly mundane list isn’t it? But this has served to convince me I have been busy lately (if you can call sitting on the sofa watching 22 blokes kick a football about a bit being busy).

Returning to number 7 on the list, while we were in Devon we visited Topsham, a lovely little village (which is actually classed as a suburb of Exeter I believe). Topsham is home to an antique market. A veritable Aladdin’s cave on three floors – which, much to Mrs Darce’s dismay, had some vinyl J

So, as far as I can remember, for the first time in my life I bought some vinyl in an antique market. This turned out to be more expensive that I had bargained for as Mrs Darce, tired of waiting for me to rifle through yet another stack of LPs, wandered off and bought (yet another) pair of earrings.    

I bought four albums in total, including this excellent Isley Brothers compilation Tamla Motown Presents… on the budget MFP label (this is actually a Dutch press, funny, I always thought of MFP as quintessentially English).

The compilation includes a few tracks that were essentially left in the can, never being released as 45s, nor on bona fide Isleys albums, and made their first appearance on this album in around 1972. One such track is this gorgeous version of My Love Is Your Love (Forever), written by Ivy Joe Hunter and Stevie Wonder and taken at a slower pace than the more well-known Smokey Robinson & The Miracles take on the song, and all the better for it in my opinion. 

Ronald Isley’s voice is a thing of beauty, that's for sure.

The Isley Brothers – My Love Is Your Love(Forever) 1967

Toe poke

On Saturday, after yet another shift painting kitchen cabinets (almost finished now), I experienced shooting pains in my right big toe. (Sorry to bore you with my minor ailments, but I have been experiencing these pains off and on for a year or so now. In a recent development the pain seems to alternate between my right toe and my right thumb!) Anyway, the pains on Saturday were a bit worse than usual and caused me to hop about a bit and audibly wince. Mrs Darce was not impressed and, as usual, offered no sympathy, giving me instead one of those ‘man up’ looks. I hobbled over to the sofa, sat down and gave my toe a good rub and a squeeze.

Yesterday morning, early doors at the car boot, once again records were thin on the ground. The round had been done and I was talking to some other record hunters bemoaning the lack of reggae vinyl, in any condition, that I had come across this year (no doubt sounding like a broken record as it, quite frankly, has always been thus it seems). After the conversation had reached its natural conclusion I bid my compadres farewell and headed off to another car boot. Records were more in evidence at this venue than they had been for some time. At one table I paused and looked dubiously at what was fairly clearly going to be a stack of run of the mill 70s/80s pop singles. Expectations are never high when a lot of pic sleeves are visible but I have to look through them just in case. As it turned out my instincts were correct on both counts: the singles were all 70s/80s pop rubbish except, bizarrely, for a sleeveless one in the middle of the stack… a Ska single from Delroy Wilson with the title Squeeze Your Toe!  

Now that is worthy of a post I thought, and so it is that Feel It has been kick started (or, rather, toe poked) into life again.

This 45 (at least the playing surface) looks a bit battered, par for the course on most reggae and ska records found in the wild, but it plays through OK. A clean with the magic fluid has improved it a bit and, when I get around to it, the PVA glue treatment may help some more. In the meantime enjoy Delroy Wilson complete with the noise of 50 years of existence.

The next time my toe hurts I will play this 45.

Delroy Wilson – Squeeze Your Toe (ComeDown From Your Palms And Pray) 1963

Here’s the B side too…

Dimples & Delroy – Sugar Pie 1963