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August 17, 2003
Second Guessing
This week I've been ripping CDs like a madman. I must have ripped about 75 discs. It has given me an opportunity to relive my musical past, some of it good. Then I realize how much money I have spent. As the country song says, I know what I was feeling, but what was I thinking?
I used to be a DJ in 1980. Naturally, I did receptions and church functions and otherwise upscale stuff appropriate for my sub $1000 setup. (Setton components, stacked Advents, Dual 880 Belt Drives, Sony TC-K5, Audio Technica mike, ADC cartridges, Sennheiser headphones.) I would have loved to have had the big JBL L212s and the Soundcraftsmen amps and a nice parametric equalizer and the Kenwood turntables with the marble base, but unlike some of my LA contemporaries, I didn't have quite enough nerve to sell cocaine to get me into the big equipment. Be that as it may, being a DJ is always a risky enterprise. Why, because you have to work the crowd. You have to know their tastes and second guess them as well. You have to know when to lead and know when to follow.
In a DJ's mind are thousands of songs and the moods they create. But there is an inner picture and an outer picture as well. What every DJ knows most intimately and what gives the DJ the bittersweet experience common to all artists, is the knowledge of the songs people ought to like, but don't. So as I've been ripping tracks from my compilations going back two decades, I get emotional about this or that cut. I am deep in the finding.
The one song that hurts me the most, of all of them (and now I know Google is God) is this one called 'Release the Beast' by a group called Breakwater. There is no question in my mind that this should have been the song that should have made Breakwater at least as big as Brick or the Dazz Band. I tried and tried. I played that song to death. It never happened for me or for Breakwater. I have it on casette somewhere.
Anyone who knows anything about the Old School mucisally, knows Philippe Wynne. He had to be R&B's greatest lyrical improvisor. If you don't know his name, you know his voice. He is the man you lipsynch whenever you hear any of the Spinners greatest songs. Your favorite is "Oh Sadie May, still loving us all in your special way". Or maybe it is "I was a fool, you were a fool. Now we got love, now we need huggin.. Can we just talk for a minute? You know uh, like I've always said, I'm not much of a rapper but.." Ha. He had the kind of rap none have heard before nor since.
So the very idea of Philippe Wynne collaborating with George Clinton curls the toes. When I heard him as the field sargeant on a cut called 'Uncle Jam's Army', I was flipping out. Was that not the funkiest song on the planet? Yes. Did people dance when I put it on the turntable? Hells no. But it almost doesn't matter because of his performance on the greatest funk song ever recorded.
Knee Deep.
Starting at nine minutes and fifty-two seconds into the song, just after one of the greatest guitar solos in the funk universe, Philippe Wynn chants "Ants in my pants and I need to dance." One minute later after scatting syllables most every funky soul on the universe knows how to sing but nobody on this planet knows how to spell, after asking the eternal question "Could this be me, immersed in funk so deep?", he says "Get on up" and you do. You get on up like the groove was the last oxygen you were ever going to taste. Even to this day it is hard to imagine how great a masterpiece this song is and how comforting it was for DJs to slip that onto the spindle and know the walls would empty and the floor would fill. But I've got to move on because I want to talk about Eddie Hazel.
It's not fair to me or to you that I am listening to a rare live performance of Eddie Hazel playing 'Maggot Brain'. That's because as soon as I wrote the words 'greatest guitar solo' I began to taste the maggots in the mind of the universe. And now that I'm thinking of 'greatest guitar solo' I am thinking of asking you all, and I know that somebody's going to say Jimi Hendrix playing Red House live at the Isle of Wight.
So I'm done writing, man. I've got some music to listen to. Sorry.
Posted by mbowen at August 17, 2003 01:09 AM
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