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Posts tagged ‘Lou Johnson’

Jun 22

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Uptown soul masters

Gene Burks

If you’ve been reading these pieces for a while, you’ll know that I have a soft spot for heavily orchestrated male soul balladeers from the first half of the 1960s. Much of this kind of music came out of the Brill Building in New York, but as Ady Croasdell points out in his notes to an excellent new compilation called Soul Voices: 60s Big Ballads, it was a style that migrated to Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Memphis and elsewhere.

Its great producers and songwriters included Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Jerry Ragovoy, Bert Berns, Teddy Randazzo and Van McCoy. Among the most expressive voices were numbered Chuck Jackson, Garnet Mimms and Ben E. King, who were big names back then, and such cult favourites as Lou Johnson, Jimmy Radcliffe, Walter Jackson, Tommy Hunt and Tony Mason. All those luminaries are to be found among these tracks, together with such lesser known singers (to me, anyway) as Clarence Pinckney, Garrett Saunders, Gene Burks and Brooks O’Dell. Be assured of this: they all have something to say, and something worth listening to.

One way of looking at this album, admittedly in a slightly reductive way, is to see it as a 24-track publishers’ demo for the next Walker Brothers album in, say, 1966. It’s possible to imagine Scott Walker recording almost any of these songs with Ivor Raymonde arrangements in the old Philips studios on the Bayswater Road near Marble Arch, as he did with “Make It Easy on Yourself”, “My Ship Is Coming In”, “Stand By Me” and “Stay With Me Baby”.

But the results wouldn’t have been as good. Apart from the great songwriting, arrangements and production, what makes these sides so powerful is the quality shared by all the singers: a certain dignified ardour, usually resigned, occasionally optimistic, generally suave, always grown-up. A compilation that chooses to start with Walter Jackson’s sombre “Forget the Girl”, a wonderful Chicago record with marvellous Floyd Morris piano octaves tinkling through the Riley Hampton arrangement, is setting itself a challenge, but the standard never drops.

Sometimes it reaches the heights. Those moments certainly include Chuck Jackson’s “I Can’t Stand to See You Cry”, a Van McCoy masterpiece worth listening to all the way through again, once you’ve had your heart satisfactorily torn apart by Jackson’s lead vocal, just for the quality of Gary Chester’s drumming. Equally magnificent is Jimmy Radcliffe’s “Through a Long and Sleepless Night”, a classic Bert Berns production arranged for Spanish guitar, double bass and, I’d guess, the Greek chorus of Cissy Houston and Dee Dee Warwick.

Sometimes the individual components of the style make themselves obvious, like the gospel influence on Garnet Mimms’ “Anytime You Want Me”, produced by Jerry Ragovoy, or the Latin tinge of James Carr’s “Lover’s Competition”, or the southern soul of Gene Burks’s “Can’t Stand Your Fooling Around” or the Spectorish sweep of Jimmy Beaumont’s “You Got Too Much Going For You”. Elsewhere there’s the mellifluous strength of Roy Hamilton on “Heartache (Hurry on By)”, the striking tuba intro to Kenny Carter’s “Like a Big Bad Rain”, Al Hibbler’s gentle crooning on Randazzo’s “Good For a Lifetime”, the ice-rink Wurlitzer intro to Junior Lewis’s unreleased “I Love You So Much”, and a lot more besides, including two slices of prime Bacharach: Lou Johnson’s original version of “Reach Out For Me” and Tommy Hunt’s unreleased remake of “Don’t Make Me Over”, which uses the Dionne Warwick backing track.

So now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to slip a gaberdine raincoat over a navy mohair suit and go out and walk the tear-stained streets. This isn’t the weather for it, but the soundtrack never gets old.

* The photograph above is of Gene Burks. Soul Voices: 60s Big Ballads is on Ace Records.

Jun 16

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Two gentlemen of soul

Lou Johnson

While I was interviewing Allen Toussaint at length recently, for a piece published in the current (July 2014) issue of Uncut, I asked the great man which of his many songs was his favourite. Well, he replied, he’d have to say “Southern Nights”: “It’s like a little movie to me, every person in it is a real story of what happened then, when I was six or seven years old.” Then, after a pause, he added: “If I have a song that I consider more of a serious song, there’s one that no one would know but me called ‘Transition’. No one would ever know that, but it’s the most serious. If I was going to grade myself on how did you do as a songwriter, I would probably put that down.”

I told him that I’d be looking for it. He shrugged, as if to say, “Don’t bother.” Which, of course, made me all the keener to find it.

The version I discovered — there may be others — is hidden away on an album by Lou Johnson called With You in Mind, released on the Volt label, a Stax subsidiary, in 1970. That made me particularly happy since Johnson has been one of my favourite singers since I first heard his original versions of “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me”, “The Last One to Be Loved”, “Reach Out for Me” and “Kentucky Bluebird (A Message to Martha)” in the early ’60s. He’s one of that breed of smooth-but-gritty uptown soul singers — also including Chuck Jackson, Jerry Butler and Jimmy Radcliffe — who could slip into a Bacharach-David song as if it were a made-to-measure suit.

Born in New York City in 1941, Lou Johnson should have been the male Dionne Warwick. He had Bacharach’s songwriting, arranging and producing genius on his side at exactly the right moment. Somehow it didn’t happen, and he remained in relative obscurity. A couple of years ago Ace Records collected his Big Hill/Big Top sides — the Bacharach material and much more, including a stunningly different version of “Walk On By” produced by Toussaint in 1966 — on a CD titled Incomparable Soul Vocalist, and his 1968 album for Atlantic’s Cotillion subsidiary, Sweet Southern Soul, produced by Jerry Wexler and Tom Dowd at Muscle Shoals (with arrangements by Arif Mardin), was reissued in 2004 on the Water label. It’s all worth hearing.

With You in Mind was his last recording. It has never been reissued, either on vinyl or CD, for reasons that — according to Tony Rounce, the world expert on matters pertaining to Lou Johnson — are to do with a dispute over ownership of the tapes. I’d guess that argument has its roots in the original release, which came at a time when Stax had lost its entire back-catalogue to Atlantic Records and was desperate to rebuild. Presumably they leased the master from Sansu Enterprises, the production company Toussaint ran with his partner, Marshall Sehorn, who gets a co-production credit. It would be interesting to see what the contract said.

The first surprise was that “Transition” is eight minutes and 19 seconds long: an unusually epic scale for a songwriter associated throughout his hit-making career, from “Mother-in-Law” to “Lady Marmalade”, with three-minute miracles. It’s a multi-part song, quite heavily arranged and orchestrated, beginning with Toussaint’s solo piano (which shadows Johnson’s voice throughout) but evolving to include elaborate scoring for horns, strings and a backing choir as well as a full rhythm section (including that infallible trademark of quality, the electric sitar). With all its tempo and dynamic changes, it reminds me of a Broadway musical — in a good way, I hasten to add. It’s a song of self-discovery and redemption with the occasional touch of great soul-music lyric-writing: “Can we take the bad times / Just like the glad times / Can we take the bitter with the sweet / In the house on the street of love.” It finishes with an intriguingly enigmatic climax, Johnson in full bebop scat-flow while a trumpeter and the electric sitarist develop a free-jazz jam, leading to a strings-only fade pitched somewhere between Gyorgy Ligeti and “I Am the Walrus”.

The other nine tracks are less ambitious but equally congenial, driven along by Toussaint’s expert house rhythm section (the Meters, basically) and horns. At the other end of the extreme from “Transition” is a tight little song called “Crazy About You” written by the Meters’ guitarist, Leo Nocentelli, a bit of classic ’70s pre-disco soul with fantastic bass-playing (take a bow, George Porter) and a horn-driven breakdown that I’d describe as beautifully reminiscent of Eddie Kendricks’s “Girl You Need a Change of Mind” were it not for the fact that Kendricks’s dancefloor classic lay a couple of years into the future. Toussaint’s “Who Am I?” is another beauty, sung against a fine New Orleans groove, as is “The Beat”, a laconically funky piece on which the writer/pianist/arranger/co-producer can also be heard double-tracking the backing vocals. The best of the lot might be a tortured southern-style ballad called “Nearer”, which would have been worth a place on one of the late Dave Godin’s Deep Soul anthologies.

Toussaint and the Meters, Bacharach and David, Wexler and Mardin: no one can say that Johnson wasn’t given the platform for a successful career. It just didn’t happen. Apparently he’s spent the last few decades living in Los Angeles, not far from the airport, occasionally playing piano in clubs but refusing all invitations to perform for his fans in Europe (the hip-swivelling “Unsatisfied”, a 1965 Big Top recording, is a Northern Soul favourite).

A peculiarity of With You in Mind is that no one seems to have tuned the piano, which sounds a fraction out. In fact that may be a fault of the vinyl pressing, both of the one I acquired on eBay and of those that people have used to upload on to YouTube. It certainly seems unlikely that Toussaint, such a meticulous man, would have put up with a slightly desafinado instrument on one of his own productions. In my view, however, it only adds to the character of the recording. If I ever have the good fortune to meet him again, I’ll ask him about it.

It’s not at all hard to imagine Toussaint and Johnson getting on well together. The former is a gentleman, and the latter sings like one. It would be great if someone could sort out the legal problems and make their fine and overlooked collaboration available once again.