Bettye LaVette - 2007 - The Scene of the Crime

 

Anti- – 86873-2  248.87MB FLAC

The Oakland Public Library copy of The Scene of the Crime looks appropriately battered. A white classification sticker sits over the lower-left corner, the disc has been marked through its center, and a large barcode occupies the back above a photograph of a car abandoned at the edge of darkness. The artwork is nearly black, interrupted by harsh white light and the red of Bettye LaVette’s name and track list. There is no glamorous portrait, smiling comeback photograph or tasteful retro decoration. The CD looks like evidence. Something happened here, and the listener has arrived after the damage.
The title refers to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where LaVette returned in 2007 to make the album, but she was precise about where the real offense occurred. In 1972 she recorded an entire LP at Muscle Shoals Sound for Atlantic Records, backed by musicians who would become part of the region’s legend. The record was mastered, the artwork prepared and a promotional tour booked. Then Atlantic cancelled it without explanation and asked her to return the plane tickets. The tapes sat unheard for decades, supposedly lost, until a French collector located them and released the album in 2000 as Souvenirs. When Terry Gross asked whether going back to Alabama felt like a reunion, LaVette called it something closer to revenge: she had returned with her voice intact, and the industry had failed to kill her. The “crime” was not committed by the musicians in Alabama. It happened in Atlantic’s offices, where a finished career-making record was quietly buried.
By the time The Scene of the Crime appeared in September 2007, LaVette was sixty-one years old and in the strangest phase of a career that had begun forty-five years earlier. Born Betty Jo Haskins in Muskegon, Michigan, and raised in Detroit, she did not grow up singing in church. Her parents’ living room contained a jukebox stocked with blues, country and R&B, while touring gospel performers sometimes passed through the house. At sixteen she recorded “My Man—He’s a Lovin’ Man,” which became an R&B hit and sent her on the road with Ben E. King, Clyde McPhatter and another newcomer, Otis Redding. She expected the next record to carry her into permanent stardom. Instead, promotion failed, contracts dissolved and each opening seemed to close as she reached it.
Her life became a series of near-arrivals. “Let Me Down Easy” gave her another R&B hit in 1965 and placed her on tour with the James Brown Revue. Later sessions produced strong singles, but another planned album disappeared. A 1978 disco record sold well after she had signed away her rights to escape the contract. She spent several years in the touring production of Bubbling Brown Sugar, learning staging from Honi Coles and Cab Calloway. Motown finally released her first proper album in 1982, but a corporate shake-up left it poorly promoted. Through much of the 1990s she worked local Detroit engagements, sometimes playing three shows in one Saturday night. LaVette had never stopped singing. The world had stopped making space for her.
That space began reopening after the lost Muscle Shoals album surfaced in 2000. A live European release followed, then A Woman Like Me won her a comeback award from the Blues Foundation. Her stage show persuaded ANTI- Records to sign her, and I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise in 2005 brought the broad attention she had been waiting for since adolescence. Producer Joe Henry gave her songs by women including Lucinda Williams, Dolly Parton, Sinéad O’Connor, Fiona Apple and Aimee Mann. LaVette did not treat them as respectful covers. She made each lyric sound extracted from her own history. The Scene of the Crime had to follow that breakthrough without repeating it. The answer was a return to the old wound with a louder band.
ANTI- paired LaVette with the Drive-By Truckers, Southern rock musicians whose relationship to Muscle Shoals was personal as well as musical. Patterson Hood’s father, bassist David Hood, had played on LaVette’s abandoned 1972 album. Spooner Oldham, another musician from those sessions and one of the architects of Southern soul, joined the new record on piano and Wurlitzer. David Hood returned for several tracks, while Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, Shonna Tucker, Brad Morgan and John Neff formed the rougher central band. The sons and survivors of Muscle Shoals were helping LaVette finish an argument begun before some of them were born.
The collaboration was not peaceful studio tourism. LaVette worked quickly and disliked extended rehearsal. The Truckers preferred to refine arrangements, which she interpreted as a lack of preparation. Patterson Hood later recalled the band pretending to finish for the day, driving around the block and returning after she left so they could rehearse without being scolded. Many vocals were first or early takes. That tension can be heard throughout the album. The musicians leave space while guitars scrape at the edges. LaVette sounds as if patience has expired. She does not float above the band. She confronts it, forcing their Southern rock weight to move at the speed of her phrasing.
“I Still Want to Be Your Baby (Take Me Like I Am)” opens with a low guitar figure, thick bass and Oldham’s electric piano. Written by Eddie Hinton, another gifted Alabama musician damaged by the record business, the song is a plea without submissiveness. LaVette does not ask to be accepted because she promises improvement. She demands recognition in her present condition, scars and all. The guitars churn without becoming a wall, and her voice moves from controlled warning to open insistence. It is the ideal entrance for an artist returning to the place where an earlier version of herself had been rejected.
“Choices,” associated with George Jones, becomes less a country confession than a courtroom statement delivered after the verdict. The lyric considers decisions that cannot be reversed, but LaVette refuses the comfortable wisdom of hindsight. She sounds irritated that wisdom arrived only after the damage. The performance also fits her career with uncomfortable precision. She made choices, but labels, producers and executives made choices about her as well. A song often heard as one man accepting responsibility becomes a more complicated inventory of agency, regret and power.
“Jealousy,” written by Scottish singer Frankie Miller, creeps rather than strikes. Rim shots, Wurlitzer and guitar hover around LaVette while she studies an emotion that poisons both the person feeling it and the person receiving it. Her voice narrows into suspicion, then opens into accusation. She does not begin at maximum intensity. She places pressure on individual words, delays phrases and lets contempt flicker through the spaces. By the time she raises her voice, the song has already been wounded from within.
“You Don’t Know Me at All,” written by Don Henley, John Corey and Stan Lynch, could easily have become polished adult rock. LaVette removes any comfort from it. The title becomes a charge against every lover, executive, critic and audience member who assumed they understood her from a handful of records. The arrangement stays clipped and tense, allowing her to spit the lyric rather than decorate it. Much of The Scene of the Crime works this way: songs written for other people become testimony in a case LaVette has assembled for decades.
Willie Nelson’s “Somebody Pick Up My Pieces” is the album’s exhausted center. LaVette admired Nelson and chose songs according to whether she believed she could inhabit them, not according to genre. The band slows into a bruised country-soul sway while she surveys the aftermath of collapse. She sounds too tired for theater, which makes the song heavier. Pieces remain because the person who broke apart no longer has the strength to gather them. The title could describe her scattered discography: singles across labels, unreleased albums, rights signed away and performances remembered by people who could not buy the records.
“They Call It Love” asks whether the damage people inflict on each other deserves such a generous name. The rhythm has a swampy drag, and Oldham’s keys answer LaVette’s doubts without resolving them. Her skepticism is not cynical distance. She continues wanting love while presenting evidence against it. “The Last Time,” written by John Hiatt, tightens that contradiction into less than three minutes. Pedal steel and guitar frame a promise that one final injury will truly be final, although her delivery suggests she has made the promise before. Her strength is never the absence of weakness. It is her willingness to show weakness without accepting humiliation.
“Talking Old Soldiers” is the album’s most exposed performance. Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote it as a conversation with an elderly man drinking alone, but LaVette turns the barroom story into a meeting with everyone left behind by time. The arrangement gives her little shelter. She sings about old comrades disappearing until friendship resembles a graveyard, and the cracks in her voice become part of the narrative. At sixty-one, after watching peers become stars, disappear, die or enter history without her, she did not need to imitate the song’s loneliness. The performance is not nostalgia. It is survivor’s fatigue given melody.
Then comes the only song written for the album, “Before the Money Came (The Battle of Bettye LaVette).” Patterson Hood assembled it from stories she told during the sessions. LaVette recounts recording R&B in 1962, knowing David Ruffin before the Temptations, watching friends reach the Grammy stage while she remained in Detroit, and surviving deals that repeatedly collapsed. The band gives the history a hard, almost cheerful bounce, preventing the song from becoming a request for pity. She is not asking the listener to mourn what should have happened. She is establishing seniority and collecting a debt. Forty years of obscurity become credentials rather than shame.
“I Guess We Shouldn’t Talk About That Now” closes the record with unresolved tension. Its title sounds like an attempt to end an argument, but LaVette sings as though silence will only preserve the evidence. Guitars curl around her, and the song refuses the uplift expected from a comeback story. There is no tidy forgiveness, no claim that later recognition repaired earlier neglect. The album ends with the subject still in the room. She does not convert suffering into a reassuring lesson for people who did not suffer it.
In 2007, LaVette was finally experiencing machinery that should have surrounded her decades earlier: a committed label, major press, international touring, serious producers and audiences arriving already aware of her name. The album earned a Grammy nomination, yet success did not turn her into a gracious museum piece. She remained demanding, funny, suspicious and fiercely conscious of lost time. Her performances carried the discipline of someone who had spent years singing for small fees in rooms where nobody cared about her legend because no legend yet existed. She later explained that a singer has to find the place where a song hurts personally. The Scene of the Crime is built from those pressure points.
The library copy makes an accidental extension of the album’s argument. The striped tray, markings, stickers and barcode interrupt the crime-scene imagery, but they also show that the disc continued circulating after the publicity cycle ended. This is not a sealed artifact commemorating a comeback. It is a working copy, borrowed and returned, its surfaces accumulating small injuries while the music remains available. That condition suits Bettye LaVette. Her career was never preserved in perfect packaging. It was scattered, mishandled and repeatedly reassembled.
The Scene of the Crime is often described as a comeback album, but “comeback” suggests that LaVette had gone somewhere. She continued singing while labels stopped listening. The sharper lesson is that recognition and ability do not move together. Talent can exist for decades without the institutions that certify it, and history can mistake poor promotion for artistic failure. In 1972, Bettye LaVette left Muscle Shoals with a finished album and a future that appeared to be opening. In 2007, she returned with the future mostly behind her, a younger rock band waiting for instructions and a voice strong enough to reopen the case. The evidence had not disappeared. It had only been sitting in the dark.

Charles Bradley - 2013 - Victim of Love

Dunham – DUN 1004  269.95MB FLAC

The Oakland Public Library copy of Victim of Love has been reduced to the essentials. The original front cover remains, but the rear artwork has been replaced by a plain sheet listing the eleven songs beneath an enormous library barcode. The disc itself is an almost cheerful shade of pink. Stickers crowd the cover, yet Charles Bradley’s face survives them. Photographed from below, his collar raised and studded with silver, he looks upward with an expression caught somewhere between endurance, suspicion and prayer. The pink title could advertise a romantic comedy. Bradley’s face warns that love will not be treated lightly. This copy entered the library system after the album’s release and after Bradley’s death, when his extraordinary late arrival had already become a completed story. When Victim of Love appeared in April 2013, however, he was still standing inside the miracle, unsure how long it would last.
Bradley was sixty-four years old when this second album came out. Two years earlier, No Time for Dreaming had introduced him as a new recording artist at an age when the music business usually files singers under “legacy act” or “reissue campaign.” He had no youthful hits to revive and no famous catalog waiting to be rediscovered. His first nationally released album really was his debut. The documentary Charles Bradley: Soul of America then exposed the decades behind that supposedly sudden appearance: childhood abandonment, homelessness, endless work, family trauma and years spent performing as a James Brown impersonator while his own name remained absent from record-store shelves. By 2013, audiences did not merely hear Bradley’s songs. Many knew the life compressed inside his voice.
Charles Edward Bradley was born in Gainesville, Florida, in 1948 and initially raised by his grandmother after his mother left while he was still an infant. At eight, he was taken to Brooklyn to live with her, but the reunion did not produce an easy home. At fourteen, Bradley ran away and spent roughly two years surviving on the streets and sleeping in subway cars. One of the few clear visions available to him arrived in 1962, when his sister took him to the Apollo Theater to see James Brown. Bradley remembered Brown flying onto the stage beneath purple and yellow lights, transforming the theater into a place where one man could command color, rhythm, movement and attention. He began practicing Brown’s moves at home with a broom as a microphone, but inspiration did not immediately become a career. Nearly four decades would pass between the boy watching James Brown and the older man finally being recorded under his own name.
Job Corps gave Bradley an exit from the streets. He was sent to Bar Harbor, Maine, and trained as a cook, beginning a working life that moved through kitchens, temporary jobs and several parts of the country. Cooking was not a colorful footnote added later to brighten his biography. It was how he survived. Music appeared in fragments: local performances, rehearsals, abandoned possibilities and a recording attempt that failed to produce a career. By the 1990s, Bradley was back in Brooklyn performing in clubs as Black Velvet, a James Brown impersonator. The act placed him onstage but kept him inside another man’s outline. He could execute the screams, microphone moves, dramatic collapses and cape routines, yet the audience arrived expecting Brown. Bradley was honoring the artist who awakened him while postponing the more frightening task of discovering what Charles Bradley sounded like.
His life outside the clubs remained unstable. He returned to live near his mother, worked as a handyman and endured the murder of his brother close to their home. That grief later surfaced in “Heartaches and Pain,” one of the most devastating recordings associated with his debut. The theatrical agony of Black Velvet was becoming inseparable from actual loss. When Daptone cofounder Gabriel Roth encountered Bradley’s act and eventually introduced him to guitarist and producer Thomas Brenneck, the challenge was not to teach Bradley how to sing. It was to pull him out of James Brown’s gravitational field without removing the urgency that had kept him performing.
Bradley also became part of the physical construction of Daptone’s House of Soul in Bushwick. He repaired steps, worked on walls, installed radiators and argued for a functioning upstairs oven so he could cook for the label’s musicians. This matters because Daptone was not simply a company that found an older singer, placed him in vintage clothes and sold his pain. Bradley helped build the place where the records would be made. In 2003, Roth took him to Staten Island to meet Brenneck and the musicians who would become central to his sound. The group recorded several singles, while Brenneck talked with Bradley about his life and searched for the line between influence and identity. “The World (Is Going Up in Flames)” and “Heartaches and Pain” proved that Bradley did not need to impersonate anyone to sound monumental.
Success did not instantly remove the habits of insecurity. After No Time for Dreaming and the documentary brought him international attention, Bradley had only recently moved out of public housing. He used music income to renovate his mother’s basement into a small apartment so he could remain close enough to care for her. His major purchase was a used van chosen partly because it could support handyman work if the music money disappeared. That vehicle reveals what Victim of Love meant at the time. Bradley was touring Europe, receiving ecstatic reviews and watching audiences cry, yet he still prepared for the possibility that the door might close. The overnight success was not living in a mansion or behaving as though history owed him compensation. He was fixing a basement and keeping a work vehicle ready.
Victim of Love was recorded with Brenneck and the Menahan Street Band, the same core group that surrounded Bradley on his debut. Brenneck brought instrumental ideas, and Bradley responded instinctively. Sometimes a track was nearly complete before Bradley heard it; sometimes music and lyrics were assembled together in the room. Bradley described listening until he understood where the words belonged, then creating them on the spot. This explains both the album’s force and its occasional rough edges. He did not write by polishing clever lines on paper. He located the emotional wound inside a groove and entered through it. The words can be plain or repetitive, but the performance convinces the listener that language has been caught at the instant of discovery.
The musical setting is broader than the one on No Time for Dreaming. That first album often resembled a hard, obscure soul record from the turn of the 1970s. Victim of Love pushes further into that decade, allowing psychedelic guitar, echo, flute, vibraphone, acoustic textures and heavier funk to disturb Daptone’s usual precision. The Menahan Street Band combines the clipped discipline of Memphis soul with the darker atmosphere that entered Black music after the optimism of the 1960s began to rot. Curtis Mayfield, Norman Whitfield, Sly Stone, Al Green and blaxploitation soundtracks pass through the room, but Bradley’s voice prevents the record from becoming a cabinet of references. He sings over carefully aged textures with an urgency no studio method can manufacture.
“Strictly Reserved for You” opens with horns that seem to straighten their jackets before entering. The rhythm is relaxed, the backing voices are sweet and the fuzz guitar leaves small burns around the edges. Bradley declares that his love has been set aside for one person, but anxiety sits beneath the promise. He does not sing exclusivity as calm security. He sounds relieved to have found somewhere safe to direct everything he has stored up. When Bradley promises his heart, he places his entire remaining life on the table.
“You Put the Flame on It” is brighter and closer to classic Motown pop, driven by handclaps, buoyant horns and backing voices that lift Bradley instead of surrounding him with sorrow. It works as a conventional love song, but in 2013 its gratitude carried a second meaning. Bradley suddenly had an audience. People who had never known him were buying records, traveling to shows, telling him that his music helped them survive their own losses and waiting after concerts for his hugs. On “You Put the Flame on It,” affection revives someone who had grown cold. The song describes romance, but it also resembles the relationship between a performer and listeners who arrived late enough to change the ending.
“Let Love Stand a Chance” slows the record into pleading deep soul. The arrangement has the formal sweep of a late-night slow dance, but Bradley cannot remain decorous. His voice catches, rises and tears against the polished backing. Love is not presented as a pleasant addition to life. It is a force being denied entry by pride, fear and accumulated damage. The song asks two people to stop defending themselves long enough for something better to happen. Bradley’s age makes that request heavier. A younger singer might sound hopeful. Bradley sounds aware of how many years can disappear while people wait for one another to become less afraid.
The title track strips away nearly everything. Acoustic guitar and faint backing vocals leave Bradley exposed, with none of the horns or percussion available to carry him. “Victim of Love” begins like a private confession but grows into a near-shout, as though he has discovered that quiet honesty is no less painful than public performance. The title holds the album together. A victim usually suffers through someone else’s action, yet Bradley describes love as both the injury and the cure. He had been abandoned, betrayed, underestimated and deprived of affection, but he refused to conclude that love was fraudulent. Instead, he pursued it with increasing desperation. The title does not mean he has learned to protect himself. It means he remains willing to be wounded by the only thing he believes can save him.
“Love Bug Blues” snaps back into motion with wah-wah guitar, flute, horns and prowling bass. It is the album’s most cinematic track, giving Bradley the temporary role of a streetwise lover moving through a 1970s city. There is humor in hearing a man in his sixties announce that the love bug has him hunting for companionship, but Bradley never treats desire as an elderly novelty. He refuses the expectation that age should make a performer emotionally neutral. His body carries six decades, but loneliness has not become theoretical.
“Dusty Blue” is the album’s sole instrumental, a compact Menahan Street Band interlude that allows the scenery to take over. Without Bradley, the listener can hear how much architecture Brenneck and the band provide: not a generic retro backdrop, but a measured environment designed to leave space for a singer capable of consuming every available inch.
“Confusion” tears that environment open. Distorted bass, echoing voices, fuzz guitar and hard drums replace romantic warmth with social panic. Bradley names fear, greed and disorder while the production closes around him. The track belongs to the lineage of psychedelic soul in which the Temptations, Curtis Mayfield and Sly Stone used studio effects to represent a society losing its center. It is not a detailed political program, but its disorientation is convincing. Bradley had spent his life encountering systems that seemed designed to conceal their rules until he had already lost. Here, confusion is not indecision. It is the atmosphere created when power, poverty and distrust become impossible to separate.
“Where Do We Go from Here” asks the question left behind after “Confusion.” The groove is softer, but the uncertainty remains. Bradley moves between private relationships and the condition of the country because he experiences both through the same moral vocabulary. People either offer love or withhold it. They either tell the truth or exploit weakness. This directness can make his lyrics seem simple, but simplicity is part of his worldview. Bradley had encountered enough complicated explanations for suffering. He wanted to know whether human beings would care for one another once the explanations ran out.
“Crying in the Chapel” is not the famous song associated with the Orioles and Elvis Presley, but an original Bradley lament. The chapel is less a physical church than the place where pain finally loses its disguise. Gospel had always lived inside his singing, even when the lyrics concerned romance or sex. Here the connection becomes explicit. Bradley does not approach God with polished serenity. He approaches as a man asking why love has again produced grief. His faith was not based on a life protected from disaster. It was the structure he credited with keeping disaster from destroying him completely.
“Hurricane” expands the album’s scale again. The band creates a humid, unsettled landscape while Bradley warns of nature’s power and humanity’s arrogance. Coming after the chapel, the storm can be heard as weather, judgment and emotional chaos at once. The song belongs to the ecological unease of early-1970s soul, when polluted cities, war and environmental damage began entering records that could still fill a dance floor. Bradley sounds less like a policy advocate than a witness who has learned not to assume that any shelter is permanent.
“Through the Storm” closes the album by answering nearly everything that came before it. Bradley looks back at darkness, acknowledges the people who placed light around him and thanks God for carrying him through. Vibraphone, guitar and horns create a gentle radiance rather than a victory parade. He does not claim that suffering was good for him or that success justified what happened. He simply recognizes that he has reached a place he once could not see. The song becomes the album’s final act of gratitude: not the triumph of a man who defeated the world, but the astonishment of one who survived long enough to feel the world answering him with love.
The life surrounding these recordings was physically demanding. Bradley was not promoting Victim of Love by sitting in a hotel while specialists carried his image to radio. He toured relentlessly, crossing Europe and North America, playing theaters, clubs, radio sessions and festivals. The show borrowed the ceremony of old soul revues: an instrumental opening, an extravagant introduction, a delayed entrance and Bradley exploding onto the stage in a bright suit. He danced, dropped to his knees, performed splits, threw roses and walked into audiences to hug people. He did not perform emotional closeness as branding. He kept trying to eliminate the distance between himself and the people who came to see him.
That is why calling Victim of Love “retro soul” explains the equipment but misses the event. The album uses old recording methods and recognizable styles, yet Charles Bradley was not recreating a youth he had enjoyed. He was entering the recording career that should have begun when this music was new. During the 1970s, while the sounds echoed here were developing, Bradley was working, moving and trying to survive. In 2013, he finally stood inside those sounds as their central figure. The past did not return. It opened a delayed door.
The library copy gives that delay one more turn. Someone preserved the recognizable cover while replacing missing or damaged packaging with typed information. The result is visually incomplete but perfectly functional. It carries the same stubborn practicality as Bradley’s life: keep what remains, repair what can be repaired and make sure the music is still available. Victim of Love does not offer the comforting fantasy that suffering automatically produces greatness. Plenty of people suffer and are never heard. It records something rarer: a man receiving his opportunity impossibly late, then using every remaining breath as though time itself had finally agreed to listen.

Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings - 2002 - Dap Dippin' with...

 

Daptone Records – DAP-001-P  233.59MB FLAC

Dap-Dippin’ with Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings looks like a record that slipped through a crack in time, and the Oakland Public Library copy makes the illusion stranger. The cover is mostly black, rubbed and scratched from circulation, with Sharon Jones pushed to the far right in a glittering red dress, microphone raised in mid-performance. The yellow, orange and white lettering, the Daptone logo, “Stereo Compatible,” and the promise of “many more Smash Hits!” imitate a budget soul LP pulled from a department-store rack in 1969. Library stickers cover parts of the title and Jones’s body. It is a new record dressed as an old one that eventually became old on its own.
The back cover continues the theater. A breathless paragraph introduces Jones as the fiercest new star on the circuit, while another photograph shows her leaning forward with the microphone, knees bent. Inside, the musicians appear in black-and-white portraits with stage names, instruments and astrological signs. Gabriel Roth becomes Bosco “Boss” Mann; guitarist Binky Griptite doubles as master of ceremonies. The Dap-Kings are characters inhabiting a complete show-business universe. Before the first note, the CD asks the listener to suspend ordinary chronology.
The remarkable fact is that Sharon Jones did not need to pretend her way into this music. When the album appeared in 2002, she was forty-five years old. Born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1956 and raised mostly in Brooklyn, she sang gospel in church throughout her life. During the 1970s she worked with local funk groups, but the recording industry never found a place for her. She later sang at weddings and worked as an armored-car guard and a corrections officer at Rikers Island. She never stopped singing, but had largely abandoned the expectation that anyone would give her an album. Her break came in 1996, when she was hired for background vocals during a Lee Fields session. Roth heard her, moved her to the front microphone and began recording her as a lead singer. She was forty before she made her first record as a front woman.
That history changes the meaning of Dap-Dippin’. Jones arrived with decades already inside her voice. She had sung to congregations, wedding guests, prisoners and coworkers, learning how to reach the back of a room and hold authority when a room did not immediately offer respect. Record companies treated her age, height, weight and dark skin as commercial defects. Daptone’s answer was to place her name in the largest letters on the cover and build the whole event around the force the industry failed to recognize.
The “Introduction” is essential. Binky Griptite welcomes the audience to a fictional Daptone Super Soul Revue and praises Jones until she enters as “110 pounds of soul excitement.” It borrows the language of James Brown revues, but it also corrects the actual course of her career. The industry kept Jones outside the spotlight, so Daptone creates a spotlight with words. She does not quietly begin and hope to be noticed. She is announced as the star before she makes a sound. “Got a Thing on My Mind” immediately proves the introduction was not empty hype. The guitar scratches, the horns jab and Jones attacks the rhythm with the impatience of somebody who has waited long enough.
The album sounds dry, narrow and physical. The horns are not softened, and the bass lacks the smooth, inflated body of early-2000s R&B. The musicians leave holes in the arrangements, then strike them with guitar chops, organ stabs, tambourine and clipped brass. Roth argued that heavy funk 45s were rough because many originals were made in basements, garages and inexpensive studios. Dap-Dippin’ was itself recorded in a Brooklyn basement, so its grit is not decoration. The limitations are part of its architecture.
“What Have You Done for Me Lately?” reveals how confidently the group could bend time. Janet Jackson’s 1986 hit is stripped of electronic production and rebuilt as compact funk. Jones does not imitate Jackson’s cool precision. She turns the complaint into an argument delivered at close range, backed by churning guitar and horns ready to testify for her. Daptone promoted the version with a joke claiming Jones had recorded the song first and Jackson copied it years later. The hoax was absurd, but the performance made it momentarily plausible. The band’s historical vocabulary was detailed enough to make a famous 1980s composition sound as though it had been hiding on an obscure 45 since 1970.
“The Dap Dip” turns the record into a live revue. It is more groove than conventional song, built for introductions, dance instructions and audience response. Jones rides the pocket instead of crowding it, shouting, teasing and directing traffic while the band proves how little material it needs to keep a floor moving. The arrangement circles tightly, but her personality prevents repetition from becoming stasis. Every phrase changes the pressure. She sounds amused by her own power, as though she has finally found musicians capable of staying out of her way without losing their grip.
“Give Me a Chance” and “Cut That Line” sharpen the romantic side. Jones never performs need as helplessness. Even when asking for affection, she sounds capable of walking away and making the other person regret the loss. These are familiar soul situations, but she delivers them as a grown woman deciding how much of herself the song has earned.
“Got to Be the Way It Is” expands that toughness into resignation without surrender. The drums and bass remain locked while the horns answer in short bursts. Jones accepts that some conditions may not change quickly, but her voice refuses defeat. This is where her age matters most. Handed to a much younger singer, the words might have sounded like a genre exercise. Jones gives them the accumulated frustration of work, rent, relationships and doors closing for reasons nobody will admit aloud.
“Make It Good to Me” is the deep-soul center. The band slows down and gives Jones room to stretch her vowels, delay her entrances and move between sensual invitation and wounded demand. The arrangement carries a Memphis weight, but the performance never feels archaeological. Jones makes the song dangerous because she does not separate desire from pride. She wants satisfaction, but will not beg prettily for it. Her voice rasps at the edges, then rises with startling clarity, showing that the rawness is controlled rather than accidental. A contemporary review recognized the song as the point where her full power became unmistakable.
“Ain’t It Hard” widens the record beyond romantic grievance. Poverty, violence and daily pressure enter the frame, and Jones sings social observation with the same directness she brings to a bad lover. The track prevents Dap-Dippin’ from becoming a costume party devoted only to vintage microphones and old dance steps. The music uses the grammar of late-1960s and early-1970s funk, but the frustration belongs to the city outside the basement in 2001.
The closing instrumentals display the machinery beneath Jones. “Pick It Up, Lay It in the Cut” is clipped motion and disciplined restraint. “Casella Walk” leaves the listener inside the ensemble, where drums, bass, guitar, organ, percussion and horns fit together like a street map drawn in rhythm. The Dap-Kings would later become known far beyond Daptone, especially through work on Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black, but here they sound like a small operation inventing its own institution because none invited them in.
That institution really was small. Daptone launched Dap-Dippin’ as its first full-length release. The band recorded it in 2001 and carried a few hundred copies to a month-long Barcelona club engagement, where sales helped keep the trip financially possible. Back home, the label could initially afford only small runs of singles, selling one pressing to pay for the next. There was no large company manufacturing a grass-roots mythology around the group. The mythology was built because the group actually worked from basements, vans, hand-to-hand record sales and repeated performances.
For Jones, a debut album did not create luxury or security. It created more work. The Dap-Kings toured constantly, recreating the revue with suits, synchronized horn movements, Binky’s introduction and Jones moving so relentlessly that Roth described her as a blur. The live show was the proof, advertisement and income. Every town required her to win the argument again: the woman the industry dismissed was the most commanding person in the room.
The library copy adds an unintended final chapter. Daptone designed the CD to resemble an artifact from a lost soul label, then time and circulation supplied the real wear. The case is scratched. The disc is ringed with Oakland Public Library markings. A barcode partly covers the back title. Somebody borrowed it because they already knew Sharon Jones. Somebody else may have discovered her because the cover looked strange among cleaner, more modern CDs. A record born from exclusion entered public circulation.
The lesson inside Dap-Dippin’ is not the sugary claim that success always arrives when a person deserves it. Jones deserved a recording career long before 2002, and the lost years were not returned. The stronger lesson is that the calendar used by an industry is not the same thing as a human life. At forty-five, she was marketed as an exciting new discovery, yet nothing about her power was new. It had been accumulating in churches, wedding halls, workplaces and rejected auditions. Daptone did not manufacture that history. It finally built a room in which the history could be heard.
The record begins by pretending Sharon Jones is already a legendary star with smash hits and a national dance craze. For a few minutes, it is playful fiction. By the end, the fiction has become a reasonable prediction. Dap-Dippin’ captures the moment before the world understood what it had missed: a singer entering her first album not as a beginner, but as a fully formed force, carrying twenty years of delayed music through the door and daring the band, the label and the listener to keep up.

Solomon Burke - 1998 - The Very Best of Solomon Burke

 

Rhino Records – 8122-72972-2  196.57MB FLAC

The Very Best of Solomon Burke looks backward from 1998, but the man on its cover has not yet become the seasoned, heavyset figure pictured on Let Your Love Flow. Rhino presents Burke in the early 1960s: pompadour high, bow tie straight, microphone in one hand, the other raised as though he is halfway between singing a love song and delivering Sunday testimony. The photograph is not merely flattering archival decoration. It tells us which Solomon Burke is inside. This is the young man building his kingdom in public, one 45, one radio market and one crowded theater at a time. The CD gathers Atlantic recordings from 1961 through 1968 rather than music made in 1998.
The comparison with Let Your Love Flow is more dramatic than the dates printed on the two CDs suggest. Although Shanachie released Let Your Love Flow in 1993, most of its material came from Burke’s 1979 album Sidewalks, Fences and Walls. That was a later Burke, nearly two decades removed from his first Atlantic breakthrough, singing longer, looser songs in a record business that had already moved through psychedelic soul, funk and disco. He was no longer a young contender trying to persuade the country that a preacher could sing secular music without leaving the church behind. He sounded like a survivor who knew the machinery of love, disappointment and the music business from the inside.
The Very Best of Solomon Burke captures the period before that experience had settled into his face. Using the 1940 birth year on Burke’s headstone, he was approximately twenty-one when “Just Out of Reach” became his first Atlantic hit and twenty-eight when he recorded “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” That seems almost absurd when listening now. The voice already carries the gravity of someone twice his age. It can sound fatherly, bruised, seductive, judicial and ecstatic within a single two-and-a-half-minute record. Yet the cover reminds us that these were not the reflections of an elderly soul patriarch. They were being made by a very young man with children, church responsibilities, business ambitions and something urgent to prove.
This was not an album-oriented career in the modern sense. Burke’s world revolved around singles. A song was recorded in New York, pressed onto a seven-inch record, taken to disc jockeys and released into dozens of local markets that did not necessarily behave alike. A record might be enormous on Black radio in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Atlanta or Memphis while remaining almost invisible to white pop listeners elsewhere. If a DJ embraced it, requests increased. If requests increased, promoters called. If the song rose, Burke might arrive in town a few weeks later as part of a package show, sing a handful of numbers, leave the stage and get back on the road. The next single could already be waiting before the previous one had finished climbing. Local radio mattered enormously, but Burke was not simply roaming between stations holding copies of his latest record. Radio created the invitation. The live circuit was where he collected the audience. His first Atlantic hit, “Just Out of Reach,” gained crucial airplay after Gene Autry encouraged stations he was connected with to play it, helping the country song cross into both the R&B and pop charts.
And yes, Solomon Burke toured. He toured hard. He played clubs, but also Black theaters, auditoriums, dance halls and package revues where several singers shared the same bill. In 1964 alone, surviving itineraries place him on large shows with Otis Redding, James Brown, Dionne Warwick, Joe Tex, Rufus Thomas and numerous vocal groups. He appeared at venues such as Harlem’s Apollo, Philadelphia’s Uptown and Baltimore’s Royal Theatre, major stations on what became known as the Chitlin’ Circuit. A typical Apollo engagement could demand several performances a day for an entire week, with singers, dancers, comedians and a film crowded into the same program. This was not the relaxed modern routine of arriving in a city for a ninety-minute evening concert. It was closer to theatrical factory work conducted under spotlights. You had to seize the room immediately because another act was waiting behind the curtain.
Imagine hearing “Cry to Me” in that environment. On record, it begins with restraint. The guitar marks out a slow, spare figure, the rhythm section leaves space around Burke, and his voice enters almost conversationally. But he is not merely comforting a lonely woman. He is building pressure. Each line tightens the screw until consolation begins to resemble seduction. In a theater, with people shouting encouragement and couples pressed into their seats, Burke could expand that tension through gesture, timing and preacherly repetition. His childhood had prepared him for exactly this kind of contact. Before becoming a secular star, he had preached and hosted gospel radio programs in Philadelphia. He understood how to feel a congregation respond, how to hold silence for an extra second and how to make one person feel that a message delivered to hundreds was meant specifically for them.
The early songs reveal Burke and Atlantic trying to invent the right setting for that ability. “Just Out of Reach” is built from country music rather than the pounding R&B one might expect from Atlantic. The arrangement surrounds him with backing voices and a gentle, swaying rhythm, while Burke sings abandonment with the dignity of someone refusing to collapse in front of witnesses. For a young Black singer in 1961, recording country material was commercially risky. Segregation divided radio formats, audiences and touring routes even when the music itself crossed those boundaries freely. Burke’s record reportedly confused some Southern promoters so thoroughly that they expected a white country singer to arrive. The song’s success opened doors, but the racial structure of the industry prevented those doors from opening equally.
That tension follows him throughout the compilation. Burke had come from the church and initially worried that being labeled an R&B singer would suggest profanity or moral compromise. Atlantic wanted secular records. Burke wanted language that would allow him to preserve his religious identity while singing about romantic need, betrayal and physical longing. “Soul music” became an answer, not simply a genre name but a bridge between the sacred authority of his voice and the worldly situations inside the songs. He did not stop sounding like a preacher when he sang romance. Instead, he made romantic need sound worthy of a sermon.
“If You Need Me” makes that bridge audible. Recorded in New York in March 1963 with producers Jerry Wexler and Bert Berns and engineer Tom Dowd, it places Burke amid horns, piano, guitar, tambourine and female backing voices. Nothing is overcrowded. The musicians provide a firm floor while Burke turns a simple offer of loyalty into something nearly spiritual. He sings as a lover, but the phrasing resembles testimony. He has known suffering, he has remained available, and he is asking the listener to recognize the truth before it is too late. The session personnel included experienced jazz and studio musicians rather than a fixed touring band, another reminder that the records and the road were partly separate worlds. Atlantic assembled specialists in the studio; Burke then had to carry the finished record into theaters with whatever musicians and rehearsal time the touring circuit supplied.
The stage version of Solomon Burke was becoming larger than the young man on the cover. During a 1963 run at Baltimore’s Royal Theatre, disc jockey Fred “Rockin’ Robin” Robinson crowned him the “King of Rock ’n’ Soul.” Burke embraced the title and expanded it into an act involving a crown, cape, scepter, throne, dancing girls and colored lights. The ceremony was repeated through the engagement, then traveled with him. This was partly show-business promotion, but it also solved a practical problem. Burke was sharing bills with performers who could dance explosively, leap across stages or tear through tightly drilled choreography. He could not compete by imitating James Brown. He competed through majesty, comedy, intimacy and command. He did not chase the audience around the room. He made the room come to him.
“Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” sounds built for that theater. It is less a conventional song than a call to order. Burke addresses the audience directly, explains the human condition and then offers the chorus as a truth everyone can answer together. On this compilation it arrives after a run of personal love songs, but its emotional scale is different. “Cry to Me” speaks into one person’s loneliness. “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” turns loneliness into a public fact. It converts the theater into a congregation without requiring anyone to admit that they came seeking church.
Burke’s life on the road contained very little of the polished glamour suggested by the tuxedo. Black performers traveling through the segregated South could be refused food, lodging and basic service. Burke responded with a mixture of resourcefulness and entrepreneurial nerve. Accounts from fellow performers describe him carrying food, drinks and supplies on tour and selling them as the bus traveled farther from available stores and restaurants. He cooked, traded and negotiated. At the Apollo, he even attempted to control the concessions and arrived with enough branded popcorn to alarm the theater’s management. The same man pleading with devastating tenderness on “I’m Hanging Up My Heart for You” might be backstage twenty minutes later selling someone a sandwich. Romance, ministry, commerce and survival were not separate departments in Burke’s life. They all traveled on the same bus.
This knowledge changes the way “Got to Get You Off My Mind” lands. The record is buoyant, almost cheerful, but it came from grief. Burke said he wrote it following the shock of Sam Cooke’s death in December 1964. Rather than performing sorrow as a slow collapse, he turns it into forward motion. The beat keeps stepping while the singer tries to command himself away from what he cannot stop remembering. It became Burke’s largest R&B success in 1965, the peak year of his Atlantic career. The song’s brightness is not proof that the pain is shallow. It is what working performers often had to do with pain: convert it into something playable, danceable and useful before the next show.
By then Burke was crossing the Atlantic as well. Photographs from his 1965 British visit show the young man from the CD cover still sharp-suited and smiling, while another image from the period catches him sweating directly into a microphone, his face compressed by the physical labor of singing. British musicians already knew his records. The Rolling Stones had recorded “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” while other young bands studied Atlantic and Southern soul records as instruction manuals. Yet Burke’s own American pop visibility never fully matched the reach of his songs. The material traveled more easily than the man who created it.
The compilation’s final stretch shows the crown becoming less secure. After 1965, Burke’s chart position weakened as Atlantic devoted increasing attention to Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin. “Take Me (Just as I Am)” moves him toward the deeper Southern sound associated with Dan Penn, Spooner Oldham and producer Chips Moman. By 1968, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” takes him to Memphis and gives him material shaped by the civil-rights era rather than private romance alone. Burke’s voice remains commanding, but the commercial landscape around it has changed. The youthful king is still singing; the kingdom is shifting beneath him.
The final track, “Soul Meeting,” makes that shift painfully visible. The Soul Clan was conceived as a gathering of major soul singers, with Burke joined by Arthur Conley, Don Covay, Ben E. King and Joe Tex. On paper it should have sounded like a summit. In practice, it never became the movement or commercial force its participants imagined. By 1968, soul music was growing more politically outspoken, funk was beginning to harden the rhythm, album culture was expanding and a younger generation of performers was taking control of the conversation. Burke was not old, but popular music can manufacture age with savage speed. A twenty-eight-year-old could already be treated as someone from an earlier chapter.
That is the deepest contrast with Let Your Love Flow. The later recordings show a man continuing after the spotlight had narrowed, working outside the central machinery that once pushed his singles through the country. His voice had broadened and darkened. Songs could stretch past six minutes. He no longer needed to introduce himself in two minutes and thirty seconds before another act came through the curtain. The performance had room to wander, preach, vamp and reflect.
On The Very Best of Solomon Burke, there is almost no room to waste. Every introduction has to establish a world in seconds. Every vocal entrance has to make the listener stop turning the radio dial. Every chorus has to survive a weak speaker in a car, beauty shop, kitchen, bar or neighborhood record store. Rhino’s booklet notes that several Burke singles had later been remixed or rerecorded for albums, while this collection restores versions associated with the original 45s. That matters because these compact performances were how most listeners first encountered him. They did not initially hear a historical figure whose importance had been carefully explained. They heard a new voice come through a small radio and seize possession of the room.
Picture a listener in 1962. The radio is on while dinner is being prepared, cars pass outside, somebody is arguing in another room. Then “Cry to Me” begins. The record lasts less than three minutes, but Burke changes the air pressure. The listener may not know about his church, the segregated touring circuit, Atlantic’s studio musicians or the child-sized mountain of responsibilities he carried. They know only that this young man sounds as though he has been waiting all day to speak directly to them.
A few months later, his name appears on a theater marquee alongside six or eight other acts. The show begins in the afternoon and repeats into the night. Burke enters in a suit, perhaps later in crown and cape. He sings the record heard on the radio, but now the voice has a body, a raised hand, a grin and the timing of a preacher who knows precisely when the crowd is ready to answer. Afterward, he returns to the bus. There is another town, another station, another theater and another single to promote.
The young man on the cover is not looking back yet. He is reaching upward, microphone in hand, still in the dangerous moment when success has begun but permanence has not been promised. Let Your Love Flow showed what remained after the first kingdom faded: the voice, the wit and the instinct for emotional theater. The Very Best of Solomon Burke shows the kingdom being constructed under pressure, while the paint is still wet and the king is young enough to believe the road might continue forever.

VA - 2001 - Homeboys Of Soul

Thump Records – 206 577 611 2  171.01MB FLAC

Homeboys of Soul is not a collector’s excavation of rare lowrider ballads, and it does not pretend to be one. Nearly every song is a major soul or R&B standard. The point is not discovery. The point is recognition. Thump Records takes a dozen records that had already lived several different lives and places them inside a specifically Chicano frame, not to claim that the music originated there, but to acknowledge where it had also made a home.

The cover makes that argument before the CD begins. Four of David Gonzales’ Homies characters gather around a copper-colored convertible beneath palm trees, a dark skyline and a stormy silver sky. The driver wears a broad-brimmed hat, vest and tie, carrying traces of an older pachuco style, while the other figures wear shades, knit caps, loose shirts and contemporary neighborhood clothes. Several generations of Chicano male style have been squeezed into one car. The vehicle carries them together in the same way the compilation carries doo-wop, Motown, Memphis soul, Southern R&B and West Coast oldies into 2001. The Homies were not anonymous corporate mascots but characters Gonzales developed from barrio life, although the imagery was frequently accused of reducing that life to gang stereotypes. Here, surrounded by the related titles advertised inside the case, they are also plainly functioning as a brand.

That commercial element should not be ignored. The inside tray advertises This Is for the Homies, Homegirls of Soul and an upcoming second Homies volume. This is part of a packaged series, created to catch the eye beside the register or in the oldies section. There are no liner notes explaining Black and Chicano musical exchange, no deep research and no attempt to uncover forgotten performers. The compilation is only twelve tracks and barely clears half an hour. It is fast, inexpensive and immediately legible.

But cheap packaging does not automatically mean the cultural connection is fake. Compilations built around oldies, doo-wop and soul had circulated through Chicano communities for decades, especially through sets such as East Side Story, whose covers joined vintage cars to romantic R&B. Homeboys of Soul belongs to that lineage, although it offers the broad-access version rather than the crate-digger edition.

The sequencing is better understood as a small social event than as a historical survey. “Shotgun” starts the disc with Jr. Walker’s saxophone tearing through the door before anyone has settled into a seat. The drums are hard, the vocal is shouted and the entire record seems to arrive already in progress. There is no slow introduction or respectful museum hush. The CD begins as party music.

Otis Redding’s “Mr. Pitiful” keeps the pace but introduces the compilation’s first emotional complication. Redding is hurt, yet he is also aggravated by the public reputation his hurt has created. Everybody knows him as the miserable man singing about a woman. His pain has become his name. That makes it a perfect early track for a collection whose cover is built around posture and presentation. The Homies look composed, but the singers keep exposing what sits beneath composure.

“Soul Man” follows as an answer. Sam Moore and Dave Prater do not erase vulnerability; they turn it into an announcement. The horns, guitar and call-and-response vocals make identity sound physical. The song does not ask quietly to be understood. It arrives with credentials. Coming after “Mr. Pitiful,” it feels less like a random classic and more like somebody rebuilding himself in public.

Booker T. & The M.G.’s “Green Onions” then removes the voice completely. Its organ riff is stripped down, sly and self-contained. Nothing in the track begs for attention, yet everything about it commands space. This is the first song that truly matches the automobile on the cover. It does not race. It rolls. The groove leaves enough air around itself for the listener to notice every drum hit, guitar answer and curl of the organ. A compilation called Homeboys of Soul needs that kind of instrumental cool, something that communicates without explaining itself.

The center of the disc changes the room. Carla Thomas’ “Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes),” Brenton Wood’s “Me and You” and the Moonglows’ “Sincerely” form a three-song pocket of openhearted romance. Thomas sounds almost surprised by her own infatuation. “Me and You” is warmer and less formal, with Wood singing as though he is leaning across a table rather than projecting toward the back of a theater. “Sincerely” reaches further into doo-wop, where the lead voice is supported by a group that turns one person’s declaration into a shared ritual.

Brenton Wood is especially important to the identity of this CD. He is the one artist here whose career became unusually entwined with Southern California’s Latino audience. Long after his largest national hits, he continued performing at Chicano festivals, weddings, quinceañeras and anniversary parties. Wood said that Latino listeners had effectively selected him from among his peers and kept his career alive. “Me and You” therefore sits differently from the other famous records. It is not merely a song that fits the theme. It represents the local, multigenerational afterlife that the entire compilation is trying to package.

The disc could have remained in that soft space, but “Hold On, I’m Comin’” interrupts it. The opening horn figure sounds less like a romantic invitation than an emergency response. Sam & Dave promise that somebody is on the way, and the music makes that promise muscular. Its placement keeps the collection from becoming a stack of slow dedications. Homeboys of Soul is built from movement and sentiment in nearly equal amounts.

James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” is the compilation’s theatrical peak. Its title appears to offer a monumental statement of masculine authority, but the performance gradually demolishes that authority from within. Brown inventories masculine accomplishments, then admits their emptiness without a woman. The arrangement gives him nowhere to hide. Strings rise around his voice while the rhythm moves at a funeral pace. On this cover, surrounded by four men posed with their car, the song acquires an extra tension. The image presents male control; the recording presents male dependence.

Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman” pushes even further. There is very little cool left in it. Sledge describes a man surrendering money, judgment, pride and the advice of his friends. Love does not improve his vision. It ruins it, and he accepts the ruin. The record’s greatness comes from the absence of defensive distance. He does not pretend that devotion has made him wise.

That emotional nakedness helps explain why old soul became so durable within homeboy and lowrider culture, but the answer is more substantial than the familiar observation that outwardly tough men also have feelings. Everybody has feelings. What matters is that these records developed a communal use. They were played while cruising, but also at backyard gatherings, dances, family celebrations, weddings and dedications. They passed from older siblings and parents to younger listeners until songs recorded by Black performers in Detroit, Memphis, Chicago, Alabama and Los Angeles became part of Chicano family memory.

The connection was historical as well as emotional. Black and Mexican American audiences in Los Angeles did not live in sealed musical territories. Soul revues played Eastside venues, Chicano groups absorbed and transformed R&B, and records moved between communities that faced different versions of segregation and policing. Lowrider soul grew from that contact. It was not a case of one community borrowing a costume from another. It became a long Black and Brown conversation conducted through records, bands, radio, cars and dances.

Johnnie Taylor’s “Who’s Making Love” brings the compilation back down from the grand suffering of Brown and Sledge. Taylor is not destroyed by romance. He is watching somebody else behave foolishly and enjoying the opportunity to explain the consequences. The groove is bright, almost celebratory, while the lyric warns unfaithful men that their own homes may not be waiting faithfully for them. It adds humor, gossip and street-level common sense after two songs that treat love as a cosmic affliction.

The Bar-Kays’ “Soul Finger” finishes the disc by returning to where “Shotgun” began. Both records are driven by horns, shouts and the sensation of a room filling with people. The compilation starts with a dance command and ends with a nonsense phrase everyone can yell together. Between those two points it passes through embarrassment, self-assertion, flirtation, devotion, dependence, betrayal and wounded pride. Then it puts the party back together.

That shape is the real mood of Homeboys of Soul. It is not purely low and slow. Too much of it jumps, struts and sweats for that description. It feels more like an afternoon stretching into night: music playing while people arrive, a few songs for dancing, a softer sequence when couples draw closer, a dramatic spell when memories begin working on somebody, then one final blast before the disc starts over.

The Oakland Public Library markings on this copy accidentally improve the object. A library sticker sits directly over the center of the disc, while a large barcode crosses the rear image of the car. These additions wreck any fantasy of the CD as a pristine collectible, but they also reveal its actual function. It circulated. It was borrowed, carried home, played, returned and borrowed again. A compilation devoted to music traveling between generations and communities ended up doing precisely that through a public library.

There is nothing rare about the track list. Someone who already owns a handful of basic soul collections probably owns every song. Yet rarity is not the measure that matters here. Homeboys of Soul is a compact neighborhood canon, a group of records chosen because they remained useful: for dancing, cruising, remembering, flirting, grieving and letting another person’s voice make a difficult feeling public.

The cover says these songs belong in the car with the Homies. The stronger claim is not that they were originally made for homeboys. It is that homeboys listened to them, preserved them, attached their own memories to them and eventually made the songs theirs.

Peter Sotos - Pure #1

PETER SOTOS – PURE #1

Year: 1984

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Format: Photocopied/typewritten zine

Editor and writer: Peter Sotos

Contents include: Robin Gecht and the Ripper Crew, Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Josef Mengele, Joseph Vacher, John Wayne Gacy, Larry Eyler, Dean Corll, and a preview of Dennis Nilsen

Style: True-crime appropriation / transgressive writing / media collage

Content note: Racism, antisemitism, misogyny, murder, sexual violence, child abuse, torture, forensic imagery, and photographs of victims

The cover of Pure #1 offers almost no explanation. A tightly cropped photograph shows dark, roughened fingers touching or holding an object whose exact identity is difficult to stabilize through the heavy photocopy grain. Beneath it, PURE is sprayed across the white page in military stencil letters.

The image could belong to a medical file, police exhibit, industrial-safety manual, or damaged pornographic photograph. It has already lost enough visual information to become suggestive rather than documentary. Whatever the original picture contained, the photocopier has converted it into a blackened texture of skin, pressure, and contact.

The title claims the opposite condition.

“Pure” implies that something has been filtered until all foreign matter is removed. Yet the zine is constructed entirely from contamination: newspaper clippings, photographs, quotations, criminal histories, courtroom material, racist abuse, sexual fantasy, political propaganda, and descriptions lifted from public reporting. Nothing inside it is pure in the ordinary sense.

Purity here means the removal of restraint.

The opening statement makes that intention explicit. It rejects humanist and feminist criticism, ridicules moral outrage, and presents people as predatory animals whose violence should be studied without sentimentality. The zine announces that it will not place compassion, social explanation, or political protest between the reader and the material.

A quotation attributed to Joseph Goebbels supplies the page’s governing idea: humanity remains animal beneath its respectable surface.

This is not merely an introduction to the contents. It is an attempt to control how every later objection will be interpreted. Anyone appalled by the pages can be dismissed as dishonest, sentimental, or frightened of human nature. Cruelty becomes realism. Empathy becomes avoidance.

The argument protects the zine before it begins.

At the bottom of the page is a Chicago post-office-box address, a note requesting contact and distribution help, and a small photograph labeled as an axe-murder victim. The manifesto, mailing information, and dead body occupy one sheet. An argument about truth becomes a practical invitation to join a circulation network.

Pure does not emerge as an isolated scream. It wants readers, correspondents, distributors, future issues, and an audience large enough to keep the material moving.

The first substantial section is titled DOGS.

The heading transforms a slur into a department name. Its letters are large, rigid, and stenciled, giving contempt the visual authority of an official classification. Beneath it, a quotation from de Sade provides cultural permission for the pages that follow.

The section begins with a Black woman identified as Beverly Marks, a witness in the Robin Gecht trial. Her life is summarized through racist and misogynistic language before the writing abandons any pretense of reporting and turns her into the central body in a fictionalized sexual assault.

A newspaper photograph of Gecht appears midway through the narrative. The image gives the accused man documentary reality while the woman becomes increasingly invented.

This is one of the issue’s basic transactions. A real person’s name, race, occupation, and courtroom role are borrowed from public information. Those facts lend authority to an imagined scene. The fantasy then overwhelms the person from whom the details were taken.

The zine does not simply describe dehumanization. Its writing performs it.

Beverly is reduced to racial caricature, anatomy, and appetite. Gecht is granted method, intention, and control. One person becomes a surface. The other becomes the organizing intelligence of the scene.

The section’s hatred is so extreme that it may initially appear intended to expose the violent fantasy of a racist offender. The page provides no stable distance supporting that interpretation. The narration savors the same power it might supposedly be criticizing, and its final contempt is directed toward the imagined victim rather than the worldview that has consumed her.

The photograph of Gecht near the section’s conclusion makes him look almost restrained compared with the writing erected around him. His face is small, ordinary, and bounded by a rectangular frame. The prose gives him a far larger presence than the image could provide alone.

Pure helps manufacture the monster it claims merely to observe.

A sideways newspaper clipping follows, presenting Gecht and the Ripper Crew through the familiar language of criminal investigation. Several suspects appear in identification photographs beneath a headline involving a “Manson-like mastermind.”

The clipping performs respectability. It has columns, bylines, quotations, and the visual organization of journalism. Pure uses that borrowed credibility as a platform from which it can travel into fantasy and return whenever documentation becomes useful again.

Newspaper fact and invented sadism are not separated into different sections. They authenticate one another.

The next major heading, LUCAS & TOOLE, resembles the logo for a partnership. Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole are presented almost as a performing duo or criminal company whose expanding claims promise material for continuing coverage.

The article reproduces reported confessions and allegations involving numerous murders across different states. Toole receives a large portrait, while the text accumulates victims, methods, locations, and grotesque statements. The quantity itself becomes part of the spectacle.

The reader is asked to marvel at scale.

Then come photographs of children: Marie, Caroline, and Susan. Their faces are arranged as a vertical memorial or missing-person display. Each photograph carries a short caption identifying absence, death, or an unresolved fate.

These faces interrupt the criminal statistics. A child’s haircut, expression, and clothing restore ordinary life for a moment. The portraits were created before the children became entries inside a murder narrative. Their original purpose was familial, institutional, or investigative. Pure repurposes them as evidence of the killers’ reach.

The photographs do not defeat the offenders’ mythology. They enlarge it.

A victim’s face can humanize a case, but it can also become the trophy through which an offender’s reputation is measured. The zine’s surrounding language continually directs attention back toward what Lucas or Toole allegedly did, thought, or claimed.

The men receive pages. The children receive captions.

This arrangement reaches a more deliberate intensity in the section titled KIDDIE TORTURE.

The heading eliminates any ambiguity about the editorial attraction. A phrase referring to the abuse of children has been transformed into a bold visual product, large enough to dominate the page before any individual child appears.

The writing opens by calling child abuse a pleasure and then celebrates Ian Brady and Myra Hindley as disciplined masters of cruelty. Their crimes are not introduced as social or psychological disasters. They are presented as demonstrations of imagination, control, and commitment.

The Moors murders supply Pure with nearly everything its editorial system desires: recognizable offenders, photographs of missing children, grieving relatives, recorded evidence, sadistic mythology, and the opportunity to turn intimacy into coercion.

Marie Payne is introduced through a small portrait. Her parents’ suffering is described, and an image of the clothing she wore when she disappeared is reproduced under the heading “vital clues.” The clothes are arranged without a body: jacket, tights, shoes.

The empty outfit is one of the most affecting images in the zine.

Clothing normally carries the shape, movement, and habits of its wearer. Here each item lies flat, converted into evidence. The person has vanished, leaving objects that can be photographed, classified, and circulated.

The accompanying prose immediately attempts to occupy that absence with fantasy. Instead of allowing the clothes to remain connected to Marie’s life and her family’s search, the writing imagines what an offender might have done with them.

Evidence becomes costume.

A photograph of the Payne family follows. Four people sit together waiting for news, their expressions suspended between hope and knowledge. The caption describes them as haunted by fear. This is not an anonymous category called “victims.” It is a household being altered in real time.

Yet the family’s grief is used to praise the offender’s power. The text treats a parent’s inability to escape imagined scenes of a child’s suffering as another achievement belonging to the killer.

This reveals the zine’s most consistent moral theft.

The pain experienced by survivors and relatives is transferred to the perpetrator’s account as evidence of his greatness. The offender receives credit not only for the original violence but for every life disturbed afterward.

Grief becomes part of his authorship.

The Lesley Ann Downey sequence pushes this arrangement further. A school photograph is placed beside a second image of a child in costume. Below, a parent describes seeing police photographs and reacting with horror.

The page briefly permits the mother’s voice to establish the distance between the child she knew and the evidence shown to her. That distance should belong to the family. Pure takes possession of it.

Several pages reproduce a transcript of the recording made during Lesley’s abuse. The typography is plain and administrative. Names are followed by colons. Pleas, instructions, interruptions, and ordinary fragments of speech are organized like dialogue from a stage play.

This is documentation at its most morally unstable.

A transcript can preserve evidence, support prosecution, and prevent denial. Detached from those functions and printed inside a zine celebrating the offenders, it becomes something else. The reader is invited into a room whose victim repeatedly asks to leave.

The transcription removes the child’s actual voice but preserves the structure of coercion. The silence created by print can make the material easier to continue reading than the original recording would be. The page becomes both barrier and delivery system.

Pure treats access as value.

The writer praises Brady’s control and interprets the child’s pleas through the offender’s supposed mastery. A small picture of Lesley’s mother appears near the conclusion, visually reduced to a footnote beneath the lengthy transcript.

Brady and Hindley then receive full-page portraits.

Their faces become icons after the victim’s voice has been consumed. Brady stares from a formal photograph. Hindley’s famous police portrait appears next, its high-contrast hair and downward gaze already hardened into one of British crime reporting’s most recognizable images.

The photographs demonstrate how criminal celebrity simplifies a human face into a logo.

Lesley’s portrait identifies a child whose life was taken. Hindley’s portrait identifies an image reproduced so frequently that it can stand for an entire category of evil. Pure relies upon that recognition while pretending to oppose conventional moral response.

The offender is more visually famous than the victim. The zine does not correct the imbalance. It depends upon it.

The middle of the issue becomes a sequence of heavily degraded images. Bodies, wounds, and dark photographic masses are copied until their details nearly disappear. Some pictures are so blackened that they stop functioning as clear evidence and begin resembling abstract textures.

This degradation produces an aura of forbidden authenticity.

The pictures look as though they have traveled through police files, underground exchanges, poor machines, and multiple generations of copying. Their damage implies scarcity and access. A cleaner reproduction might expose the plainness of the source. The ruined image feels secret.

Photocopy loss becomes aesthetic gain.

The Nazi section begins with an openly antisemitic page ending in an announcement of “Nazi triumph.” The writing piles slurs, historical figures, concentration camps, and fantasies of domination into a long paragraph that treats extermination as the ultimate expression of power.

This is followed by images associated with Josef Mengele’s experiments. Photographs of marked or damaged legs are captioned as evidence of his “genius.”

The word is not incidental. It reveals Pure’s equation of originality with the ability to harm without moral restraint.

The doctor becomes an artist. Human bodies become his medium. Historical atrocity becomes proof that imagination can operate beyond ordinary limits.

This is the same structure previously applied to serial murder, now expanded to institutional violence. The zine does not distinguish meaningfully between a private sexual offender and a physician working within a genocidal state. Both are admired for control over vulnerable bodies.

The historical system surrounding Mengele almost disappears.

Antisemitism, bureaucracy, medical institutions, military occupation, forced imprisonment, and state murder are compressed into the legend of one exceptional man. The scale of the Holocaust is used to intensify an individual criminal personality.

History becomes a personality cult.

A later page places Adolf Hitler’s portrait above a quotation and swastika. The arrangement resembles a devotional card, political poster, and scrapbook page at once. The symbol occupies more space than the text, supplying immediate visual force where argument would require effort.

The zine’s appropriation of Nazi imagery is not analytically complex. It is attracted to the historical maximum of authoritarian power and extermination because these images arrive preloaded with social prohibition.

Displaying the symbol becomes a substitute for developing an idea.

The section also demonstrates the weakness of Pure’s claimed realism. Its manifesto rejects moral consolation and pretends to examine humanity without illusion, but its perpetrators are extravagantly romanticized. They are geniuses, libertines, artists, beasts, and masters.

This is not cold realism.

It is sentimental hero worship directed toward domination.

The Joseph Vacher feature, titled LUSTMORD, shifts into nineteenth-century history. A formal portrait shows Vacher seated in a chair, dressed respectably and holding a hat. The image belongs to a world of stiff poses, painted backdrops, and long photographic exposure.

The heading turns him into a genre before the text begins.

A chronology follows, listing alleged victims, dates, ages, methods, and injuries. The format resembles an official case summary, but its repetition converts human lives into installments. Each entry provides another variation upon the same spectacle.

The list produces numbness and escalation simultaneously.

The individual names appear, but the relentless structure makes them interchangeable. Date. Age. Sex. Location. Injury. The reader begins anticipating the next item with the same motion used to scan a catalog.

At the end, Vacher receives another portrait and a notice promising Peter Sutcliffe in the next issue.

The section does not conclude with the victims or Vacher’s death. It concludes with editorial continuity.

One sexual murderer advertises another.

This is the fan-magazine logic underlying Pure #1. Offenders return as features, previews, updates, and future attractions. The zine builds a roster. Each name becomes a franchise capable of supporting photographs, quotes, timelines, and further issues.

The criminal archive becomes programming.

Medical photographs follow the Vacher section. Bodies are shown on examination tables with captions identifying injuries and forensic findings. The layout is borrowed from textbooks or official reports, where such images may have investigative or educational purposes.

Inside Pure, their function changes.

The photographs no longer lead toward diagnosis, prosecution, or prevention. They form a visual bridge into John Wayne Gacy, another recognizable offender whose face and mythology have already been mass-produced.

Gacy first appears in a clown suit outside his home. Balloons, striped fabric, painted features, and brickwork surround him. The image has become famous because it offers an irresistible contradiction: children’s entertainment beside concealed murder.

Pure needs the clown image because it performs mythology instantly.

The costume turns the case into horror iconography. It allows the publication to move from human crimes toward a figure who seems designed for folklore. The clown is not just a job or costume. It becomes evidence that evil enjoys disguise.

Photographs of recovered bodies and evidence markers follow. The Cook County medical examiner is shown identifying remains found beneath Gacy’s home. These images should return the story to physical reality: excavation, decomposition, identification, families waiting to know.

The text instead uses them as the foundation for another sexualized offender fantasy.

Once again, documentation is asked to certify invention.

A photograph proves that bodies were recovered. The prose then fills the inaccessible interior of the crimes with imagined dialogue and desire. The authority of the photograph leaks into material the photograph cannot establish.

Pure wants the freedom of fiction and the force of evidence simultaneously.

Larry Eyler enters through dense reporting about unidentified bodies, rural locations, police suspicion, and his public image. Two photographs show him as mug shot and courtroom figure. The text then announces that Pure can “celebrate” his work despite inadequate media coverage.

The word “celebrate” removes the final shelter of neutral documentation.

Pure presents itself as the publication willing to supply attention when newspapers have failed to make an offender sufficiently visible. This is not exposure of criminal celebrity. It is a bid to become its specialist press.

Dean Corll receives one of the issue’s longest closing sections. His portrait is followed by a photograph of Wayne Henley and David Brooks, then pages recounting the Houston murders in increasingly explicit language.

Corll’s suburban respectability becomes central to the image. He was known as the “Candy Man,” a local adult connected to families and young people through work and neighborhood familiarity. The ordinary face and domestic surroundings are treated as camouflage concealing an elaborate private world.

Pure is fascinated by compartmentalization.

The offender appears conventional in public and absolute in private. The split suggests a freedom from coherent identity: one man can occupy social life while secretly constructing another system with different laws.

This fantasy of the divided man is essential to the zine’s admiration. He is imagined as more complete because he can use normality as an instrument.

The boys and young men he harmed are described mainly through what was done to their bodies. Their lives before Corll scarcely appear. Henley and Brooks receive photographs, names, motives, conflicts, and narrative roles because they participated in the offender’s world.

Proximity to criminal agency grants identity.

The murdered remain plural.

The section ends with Corll’s death after Henley turns against him. Even this reversal is treated less as an escape from violence than as the dramatic conclusion of a closed male system. The victims’ families and communities remain outside the zine’s field of interest.

A final page displays John Wayne Gacy again, accompanied by an evidence marker and the discovery of remains. Another page promises Dennis Nilsen in Pure #2 beneath a large portrait and quotation.

The first issue therefore closes by creating appetite for the second.

The zine began with a statement rejecting conventional morality and a request for distribution. It ends with another offender advertised as upcoming content. Between those points, the object has transformed murder, torture, family grief, historical atrocity, and forensic documentation into a serialized publication model.

The final degraded image is almost unreadable. A face or damaged head emerges from black photocopy noise, with white areas burned out and features breaking apart. The picture has reached the point where information and texture can no longer be separated.

This is the visual destination of Pure #1.

A person enters the copier and emerges as atmosphere.

The issue is often most revealing where it believes itself strongest. It claims to strip away hypocrisy and sentimental lies, but its worldview depends on an enormous fantasy: the fantasy that domination is the most truthful form of human existence.

Every source is bent toward that conclusion.

A parent’s grief proves the offender’s reach.

A victim’s fear proves his control.

A corpse proves his power.

A political system of extermination proves the genius of an individual.

A newspaper clipping proves the reality of a fantasy.

Nothing is permitted to demonstrate tenderness, solidarity, courage, survival, confusion, accident, or resistance unless those qualities can be placed beneath the person causing pain.

The zine does not reveal human nature. It selects one relationship within human life and declares it the whole species.

Its title begins to make sense within that restriction.

Pure means a world purified of reciprocity.

No one owes another person recognition. No context limits appetite. No history complicates the icon. No victim retains an interior life capable of opposing the narrator’s use.

The result is not freedom from ideology. It is a rigid ideology in which the person who controls the page inherits the authority of every killer printed upon it.

Pure #1 is valuable as an artifact because the machinery remains exposed. The source clippings have not yet been integrated smoothly. The typewritten pages retain corrections and uneven spacing. Photographs float inside large white areas. Future issues are advertised openly. The Chicago address sits near the beginning.

The publication has not yet acquired the denser archival polish of its successors.

Its appetite is visible before style fully disguises it.

The issue can be read as an attack on respectable true crime, which pretends to honor victims while repeatedly selling perpetrators. It can be read as an exposure of how journalism, police documentation, family photographs, and historical records become raw material for spectators.

But Pure does not stand outside that economy.

It creates a smaller, harsher marketplace in which moral concern has been removed from the packaging while the same names, faces, bodies, and grief remain for sale.

The stencil title says PURE.

The pages underneath show what had to be removed to make that claim possible.