MITCH RYDER - Sings The Hits [USA rock, pop, soul 1968] 2008 DBK Works dbk542

 

Mitch Ryder Sings the Hits has much better balance than What Now My Love, the album which yielded his last and least-potent of six Top 30 singles. Detroit rockers covering the Supremes' Motown smash "Come See About Me" seemed to be in vogue -- Mark Farner and Don Brewer's excellent version showed up on Monumental Funk -- and Ryder does the song justice as well, the two blue-eyed soul copies fun and worthy of comparison. There's only one Bob Crewe original on this collection of covers, and that tune, "Peaches on a Cherry Tree," is combined to good effect with Leiber & Stoller's "Ruby Baby," an R&B hit for the Drifters in the '50s, a post-Belmonts smash for Dion in 1963. The music has that extra something that eluded the What Now My Love album, a little more intensity on songs like "Let Your Lovelight Shine," and the pop/blues version of Rufus Thomas' 1963 hit "Walking the Dog." Crewe mixes vibes in with the earthy keyboard/guitar sound, and it's just great. There are intriguing black-and-white photographs of Mitch Ryder in his prime inside the gatefold, his trademark open-mouth howl on the cover, as it is on All Mitch Ryder Hits and What Now My Love. It's a distinctive voice and sound on these recordings, more refined even than "Devil With a Blue Dress On" and "Sock It to Me Baby." Bob Crewe certainly had the magic, and it is all over tracks like Toussaint's "I Like It Like That" as well as "Sticks and Stones." Ryder even takes on James Brown with very credible renditions of "Please, Please, Please" and "I Got You," and revitalizes the Bing Crosby/Ray Charles classic "You Are My Sunshine" with a uniquely identifiable arrangement that only Ryder could give it. Mitch Ryder Sings the Hits doesn't get the attention it deserves, but is a solid effort from start to finish and makes for a good party record.

Ryder

DART - Presenting DART [USA garage soul 1968] 2020 Sundazed digital file

 

Pacific Northwestern Soul from Salem, Oregon! Unearthed originals, choice covers, and previously unreleased instrumentals guaranteed to fill the floor.

Dart

JOHNNY GUITAR WATSON - Untouchable! - The Classic 1959-1966 Recordings [USA r&b, blues, soul] 2007 Ace CDCHD 1180

 

Like many a journeyman bluesman, Johnny "Guitar" Watson led something of an itinerant recording life during much of his career, wandering from label to label in the 1950s and 1960s with just a little chart success. Untouchable! does a great service to collectors by assembling 27 tracks from 1959-1966, many of which, surprisingly, had not only never previously come out on CD, but had never been reissued in any form. While in general these are blues/R&B crossover sides, there's more variety than one might think, and though the hopping between styles makes it a little uneven, it makes for a better listen in one gulp than you might expect. There's some relatively straight blues, particularly in the earlier sides; there are rather more blends of blues/R&B with pop than many blues fans might realize exist, sometimes on covers of pop standards, and sometimes employing strings; and there are cuts, particularly in the mid-'60s selections, that verge on out-and-out soul. It's true that the three songs most likely to be familiar to general blues and rock fans are among the very best material here, those being "Looking Back," which was covered by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers (with Peter Green on guitar); "Cuttin' In," a 1962 Top Ten R&B hit and one of Watson's most effective fusions of blues (with biting guitar) and orchestration; and "Gangster of Love," one of Watson's signature tunes (though this 1963 King single, fine as it is, is not his original version). But everything here is at least OK, and much of it is above average to excellent, even on some tracks where the influences of others like Clarence "Frogman" Henry, the Olympics, the Temptations, and Ray Charles are obvious. There might be a little less guitar pyrotechnics than some straight-ahead blues fans would like, and it's unfortunate that a few interesting cuts referred to in the liner notes from this period were not available for licensing. But overall it's a solid overview of a time when Watson was among the more interesting (and certainly overlooked) artists building bridges between the blues, R&B, and soul.

Watson

Various Artists - Country Funk 1969-1975 & Country Funk II 1967-1974 (2012-2104 Light In The Attic LITA 083 & LITA 116)

Intrepid record label Light in the Attic offers us another theme-based compilation we didn't know we needed until they did it. Previous examples, Listen Whitey! The Sounds of Black Power 1967-1974, the two volumes of Thai Funk, and Our Lives Are Shaped by What We Love: Motown's MoWest Story 1971-73 to name a few, were standard bearers; they highlighted essential sounds few but collectors owned. Country Funk: 1969-1975 brings together 16 sides from the catalogs of artists well-known and marginal, whose works all share mercurial qualities: their Southern rural roots actively engage emergent funk. Tony Joe White and Jim Ford are obvious choices, but their representative tracks aren't. In the former case, it's the swaggering "Stud Spider," and in the latter's it's raw gutbucket "I'm Wanta Make Her Love Me." Nostalgic memory and longing for Southern locales are addressed in numerous places such as in Johnny Adams' "Georgia Morning Dew" and John Randolph Marr's "Hello L.A - Bye Bye Birmingham." Set opener Dale Hawkins celebrates it all in "L.A., Memphis, Tyler, Texas" as Tower of Power-styled horns meet Stax guitars and Canned Heat's laid-back boogie. Elsewhere, the deep, funky, electric blues connect Gray Fox's reading of Buzz Clifford's "Hawg Frog" and Johnny Jenkins' take on Dr. John's classic "I Walk On Gilded Splinters"; their choruses and production quite literally mirror one another. Urban Blues, bluegrass, and country gospel make their appearance in Link Wray's "Fire and Brimstone." Bobbie Gentry's "He Made a Woman Out of Me," with its wah-wahs, shimmering strings, and shiny horns offers the sultry Delta blues underscored by massive breaks. And speaking of breaks, one of the stone killers in this set is Dennis the Fox's "Piledriver," with its thoroughly urban look at a country female trucker. Bobby Darin's "Light Blue" has a smoldering bassline that is brought right to the front line just as it is in Bobby Charles' "Street People." While Cherokee's "Funky Business" fits the theme, it has as much of the Byrds in it as it does Joe South. Mac Davis' "Lucas Was a Redneck" is a little too close to Tony Joe White for comfort, but that's a small quibble. Country Funk: 1969-1975 illuminates a brief but fruitful period where genre lines blurred, and both genres benefitted mightily.

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