One of the finest singers - songwriters in soul music.
Amazing album with 3 songs in R B top10. Bobby Womack is a soul music allrounder: he can scream (like James), talk deeply to the ladies (like Issac and Barry), he has the Al or Marvin touch when it comes to love songs, the honesty of Sam and Curtis, and the occasional Sly-like urge to wig out
1
Recorded in Memphis in the blackest of soul styles, Bobby "The Preacher" Womack's Understanding overflows with raw energy and emotion.
Blurring the lines between Southern soul, funk, and gospel, the album's rough edges reflected something fundamental about life in Black America and the need to reach for something higher. Womack had learned well from his idol Sam Cooke that the people wanted to hear about something besides love. In the gritty "Simple Man," Womack preaches to his brothers and sisters:"Hang on in there.
..we don't live on a hill, but we stand just as tall.
" At the time he wrote the songs for Understanding, Womack was a man of considerable talents who had too little to show for it in the way of successful solo records. An always in demand studio musician, Womack's influential guitar playing helped define such eternal classics as Sam Cooke's "Bring It On Home," Wilson Pickett's "Funky Broadway," Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools," and "Family Affair." By 1972, his singing and songwriting had matured to such an extent that only an act of God could have kept him from storming the charts.
"Woman's Gotta Have It," one of the album's three Womack originals, shot up to the very top of the R B charts in that golden funk summer of '72. This mid-tempo soul-funk ballad starts off with a sensuous bass line straight out of Marvin Gaye's With its simple message about how to keep a woman happy--"You gotta giver her what she wants when she wants it / Where she wants it / And how she wants it"--the song touched a chord with audiences like few other Womack songs ever have. A bubble gum-soul cover of Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" was released as the follow up single to "Woman's Gotta Have It.
" While it managed to impressively crack the white-dominated Pop Charts, its mellow B-side "Harry Hippie" was embraced as the "black side" by black radio, driving it into the R B Top Ten (and, surprisingly, into the Top 40 on the Pop Charts). "I Can Understand It" is the album's funkiest and most complex track, made with timeless production values: a driving and loudly mixed bass/drum groove, a tight gospel chorus of soul sisters, lush touches of strings, and Womack's belting vocals and fuzz guitar. While this compelling Womack original never charted, New Birth turned it into a No.
4 R B hit when the band covered it in 1973. His most consistently satisfying album, Understanding captures Womack at the peak of his powers. This is the one to get.
" It was a number one single on the Billboard R B charts. In addition to the aforementioned song,
Womack also features a host of other granite numbers like "Ruby Dean" and "I Can Understand It." The latter, penned by Womack , was also covered by New Birth.Both versions are excellent. However,
Womack's version has a soothing effect as it employs a sensuous string arrangement while New Birth's rendition is rather funky, retaining a spirited horn arrangement. Womack's version was never a release."Harry Hippie" is a narrative about his brother and former bandmate Harris Womack. It checked in at number eight. The Ohio native's unique trait to calm a song with his blistering baritone re-surfaces on "Sweet Caroline," the album's third and final release.
For a song to be so sweet and gentle,
Womack enhances the flavor of this sentimental number with a heartfelt, soulful approach. It slipped into the Top 20 at 16. By all standards, this album is stirring.One of many rock groups signed to Columbia or its Epic subsidiary that got lost in a shuffle of under-promotion in the 1960s, West played mild folk-rock emphasizing their clean, careful vocal harmonies. Their self-titled 1968 debut was produced by Bob Johnston (who also did Bob Dylan, Simon Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, and Johnny Cash in the late 1960s), and comes off as a sort of Byrds-lite with some country and pop influences. Their most famous member, by far, was ex-We Five leader Michael Stewart (brother of singer-songwriter John Stewart), although indeed it's hard to figure out exactly who was in the band.
The brief liners for their first LP state that "West is comprised of no less than four and no more than six members--Ron Cornelius, Michael Stewart, Joe Davis, Lloyd Perata, (Bob Claire and Jon Sagen)." The inexactitude was compounded by cover photographs showing five guys. Not that it was much cause for speculation among the public, since few listeners heard the album oAlthough West manage a pleasing,
Byrdsy sound on their Bob Johnston-produced debut, overall it sounds rather thin and unoriginal.Half of the LP consists of competent covers of material by contemporaries like
Bob Dylan, Fred Neil, Ian Sylvia, and Dave Dudley ("Six Days on the Road"). To be unkind but accurate, these sound like the sort of cover bands that low-budget movies would employ to play familiar material when the original performers and versions were obviously unavailable for the soundtrack. The few slices of self-penned material are very much in the mold of California folk-rock circa 1967-68, and are pleasant though not outstanding.Occasionally country influences become pronounced (as on
Stewart's eccentric "Donald Duck"), and at other points there are odd touches of poppy production that sound like folk-rock with a half an ear cocked toward easy listening airplay.r its 1969 follow-up. At 128, sorry about that but this one it's very rare.
So in 1941 he loaded up the family and headed for California and a better way of life. The family settled in Bakersfield.
She learned to play the guitar after her father bought her one in 1943. Wanda practiced incessantly. As her mother later said, "Wanda wasn't like other children after the guitar came into her life.
"
She achieved a wildness and energy that was every bit as intense as her male counterparts, and today she ranks as one of the best rockabilly singers ever, male or female.
For a short period in the early to mid 1990's, a collective of Swedish musicians decided to relive the past and create improvisational psychedelic rock music similar to the early 70's masters such as International Harvester and Algarnas Tradgard.
Acts such as S.T. Mikael, Adam, Stefan and the Entheogens all recorded for the low budget label Xotic Mind.
The primary difference between the modern day copiers and the 1970's masters is the one-dimensional nature of the recordings. This trait can be attributed to most of the albums being solo projects with only guest musicians.
One of the better bands on the label were The Word of Life, a band lead by Mans P.
Mansson, a multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar, sitar, synthesizers, percussion and sings. He is joined by many guests, though most important is the fine flute work provided by Anna Nystom. On the debut, Further Ahead, Mansson manages a varied improvisational psychedelic album.
Long burning jams such as "Space Fu?king" and "Can You Feel it - Flowing Free" are offset by calm flute and hand percussion ragas like "The Devil". What one notices in repeated listens is the need for an editor (a problem for many of these kind of solo ventures).
Most of the jams meander on for too long and the inclusion of a couple of Earthy country-bumpkin vocal tracks with Louisiana-front-porch harmonica are in complete contrast to the hazy heady cosmic aspirations the album pretends to be. Still, the album works on many levels, most notably the trance-like jams, which can get quite intense. The guitar tone is super fuzz loud and the percussion is particularly active.
Recommended for all Krautrock, space rock and early Swedish pioneer groups. The original LP contained a paste-on cover and is now quite rare. Better to find the CD on Satori.
The sophomore effort, Dust, is quite a bit different from the predecessor. More variety and less jam oriented, this album tries to please on a number of fronts. "When I Was in Space" opens promisingly enough with oscillator-emulated synth runs and heavy percussion.
But, alas, this goes on too long and becomes redundant, and one wishes for the sage advice of a wily producer. The songs on this album have a sort of "retro lounge" naïve melody line motif which I find oddly appealing. No doubt there are plenty of sizzling guitar jams to bang your head to, just less of them than the ambitious debut.
I find both of their albums to be good fun if you don't take them too seriously. And a few tracks are just devastating, especially on the debut
| |
|---|
Discography:
Furthur Ahead (XMLP-2 1992)
Dust (XMLP-10 1995)
Dust (SUB XMCD-2 1996)
Mans started out with the legendary Crimson Shadows, one of the now most celebrated groups of the mid-80s garage punk wave. Their records are now much sought after and are fetching high sums in the collector circuit.
After that he started a Surf group, the Livingstones (pre-Daytonas) pre-dating the current surf trend by 10 years! Then moved in to psychedelic-hardrock territory with the group Zonk together with Stefan Kéry. He contributed to the trance-a-delic sounds of the Entheogens and ventured into innovative metal hard rock with Gone.
He created the mind bending musical experience of the Word of Life, taking psychedelic festival trance rock in to the future. He recorded with Swedish indie group Friends and now spends most of his time with the Maggots.Review:
Trance-petaled Mushroom-Jams w/flute 'n fuzz,plenty o' athmo-soother perco rafting in early 70's german Kraut-boiler-manner.
.quite a trippy venture and the spellin of "furthur"is most notable!Psychedelic sleeve to boot,insert and totally home-made label-designs.
.from Sweden with love! k-fox
"Furthur Ahead" personnel:
Måns Månsson: Vocals, Guitar, FX
Mats Ståhl: Bass, Maraccas
Daniel Ståhl: Electric Piano
Anna Nyström: Flute
Janne: Drums, Percussion
Recorded at the Sleeping Room and Lace Land studios, Sweden.
"Dust" personnel:
Måns Månsson: Vocals, Guitar, Synthesizers, FX, Percussion, Pump Organ, Marty s Bag, Sitar
Anna Nyström: Electric Piano, Hammond Organ, Vocoder, Vocals
Anders Paulsson: Bass
Adam Axelzon: Percussion
Stefan Kälfors: Drums, Percussion
Martin Rössel: Cello
track listing :
1 I Just Want to Make Love to You (4:19)
2 (I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man (4:53)
3 Let's Spend the Night Together (3:12)
4 She's Alright (6:36)
5 Mannish Boy (3:50)
6 Herbert Harper's Free Press News (4:40)
7 Tom Cat (3:42)
8 Same Thing (5:42)
In an attempt to make Muddy Waters more sellable to his newly-found White audience, Chess lumbered him with Hendrix-influenced psychedelic blues arrangements for Electric Mud. Commercially, actually, the results weren't bad; Marshall Chess claims it sold between 150,000 and 200,000 copies. Musically, it was as ill-advised as putting Dustin Hoffman into a Star Wars epic.
Guitarists Pete Cosey and Phil Upchurch are very talented players, but Muddy's brand of downhome electric blues suffered greatly at the hands of extended fuzzy solos. Muddy and band overhaul classics like "I Just Want to Make Love to You" and "Hoochie Coochie Man," and do a ludicrous cover of "Let's Spend the Night Together"; wah-wah guitars and occasional wailing soprano sax bounce around like loose basketballs. It's a classically wrongheaded, crass update of the blues for a modern audience.
~ Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide.
____________________________________________
MUDDY WATERS -- Electric Mud (MCA/Chess)
MCA recently reissued the album hailed by some blues purists as the worst blues album ever recorded--Muddy Waters' Electric Mud. Originally released in the spring of 1968, Electric Mud was Waters' first excursion into the world of 'psychedelia.' Since they were marketing Waters (at the time) primarily to the white hippies, it made sense to Marshall Chess (son of Leonard Chess, founder of Chess Records) that Waters should do an album like this. Unfortunately, it presented a problem when Waters tried to play the songs live. He didn't like having to perform in front of a huge stack of amplifiers to achieve the sound of the album.
Is Electric Mud really as bad as they say? It depends on the context in which you listen to it. As a blues/rock album, it's not that bad.
As with most albums from the psychedelic era, there's a lot of channel fading (vocals in one channel, music in the other, then vice versa, etc.). However, there are still some great guitar licks being thrown around, especially on "I Just Want to Make Love to You," "She's Alright" (which segues into a "My Girl" jam), and "Mannish Boy.
" The interesting thing here is that, according to the liner notes, none of the guitar work is by Waters himself.
As a straight blues album, it's a joke. The majority of the players on Electric Mud were actually avant-garde jazz musicians, and most of them were not able to adequately span the two genres.
Gene Barge's wailing tenor sax on the album is out of place and annoying. It just doesn't work. The cover of "Let's Spend the Night Together" is probably more noteworthy than any other cut on the album.
It's been called 'unintentionally hilarious,' among other less-than-flattering remarks. I'll just call it . .
. different. Imagine Waters trying to sing the lyrics to the music of "Get Ready.
" You get the idea.
So what's the bottom line -- is this CD worth picking up or not? It depends on what type of blues you're into.
If you're a purist, you probably already know to skip this one. If blues/rock is more your style, or you're just discovering the master, it's worth a listen, but check out some of Muddy's more traditional work first.
- Womans Health
Hotty Miss(Best Syndication) Although eating low-fat dairy foods may increase infertility risk, the consumption of high-fat ice cream may help women get pregnant. Previous researcher found that women who consumed low-fat dairy increased their risk of infertility...
- 9:50 PM
Franky MicklestoneNew Opportunities to Get On TV,Places to Party/ Network with the Stars, As Always Huge Prizes, Awards, Competitions - - UPDATED- Welcome back...
- siN's Metal News | 'pure METAL news' | SMNnews.com
Hun LeeMarch 12th, 2007, 9:56 pm With only three weeks till the release of STATIC-X ’s album on April 3, the band wants to give their fans another taste of “ Cannibal” . ‘Destroyer’ is the second track off of the new album with the raw heavy sound that Wayne S...
- Irish Rock
Sam BoyleIf you're looking for a good time this St. Patrick's Day weekend, look no further than the rock/celtic band...
- I n d i a P o s t . c o m - Mallika's visa
Hun LeeMallika Sherawat is currently shooting with Kamal Hassan for his film Dasavatharam. It is said that this will be one of the most expensive films to be made in the country and well, Mallika has added to the budget of the film in her own way...
News RSS