Barrence Whitfield: It takes a savage man to lead a savage band

Perhaps it would be overly generous to remark that every generation has its Soul-shouting spectacle who tears up stages and reminds audiences how damn good it is to be alive, aware, and partaking of the hipness known only by the clever.

Golden eras of yore had Solomon Burke, the 'Wicked Pickett,' and Little Richard. The Hep-smart presently inhaling have Barrence.

He looms atop a recordings-stash (which dates back to 1984), and from that acme looses volleys of borderline unhingedness that is very much of old-school R&B manner, were said revered genre to stick a finger in a wall socket. 

In each ringing note, chunkablock chord architecture, and snapped-tight downbeat, thrives the bold truth that Barrence and the free-for-all roustabouts with whom he makes common wildside cause are so intimately proficient in and just plain in love with Rock'n'Soul's capacity for uplift that it would be an injustice of brobdingnagian proportion for them to be doing anything other than this right here.

Glory, his and the Savages' most recent wax, was issued in 2023 by Folc Records. Its 12 engravings make my above argument with staggering aplomb. "Bad Situation" commences bacchanalian matters with knees-high brass and percussive determination that wise folks shuffling in aisles expect from Barrence and gathered gang.

With trademark insistence (vented via yowling and gleeful whoops), the man whose name adorns the marquee cuts up without filter and at towerblock volume. In fact -- thankfully -- such is his way through and through.

The band that few others would even try to follow includes founding members and guest horns. Mere adjectives would surely falter in the task of conveying members' assorted front-of-class qualities. Listen for your own edification.

"Right Hand Man" and "I Do My Best to Survive" scatter audacious eminence across airspace, variously asserting sax blats, pumped-to-maximum rhythms, and wise-to-ways-of-nightlife guitar authoritativeness.

That's all in addition to Barrence's howling from the mountaintop. He's our season's Soul-shouting spectacle.

Videos: "Bad Situation"   "Right Hand Man"   "I Do My Best to Survive"   "I'll Be Gone"

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Just reissued by Cupcakes and Muffins is 2003's Strange Adventures, a collaboration between Barrence and former Radio King fret-massager Mike Dinallo. The two are billed as the Mercy Brothers. They are further enabled by Norwegian Blues guitar nobleman Vidar Busk. Material and performances here are much closer to orthodox Soul than Barrence and the Savages' boisterous ferality.

Si Cranstoun

If a mad scientist with a bent toward coolness got hold of a Seeburg packed with stormy sides, and performed hep experimentation, zoot Si and the man's 18 Karat compadres might well materialize and jitter-bop across black-and-white tiles.

Video: "Jack and Jill"

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Steve Hooker's guitar is on fire - again

England's Steve Hooker is every bit the genuine specimen. No pretender could boast his resume. In addition to producing a decades-spanning body of vibrant, sprawling solo endeavors boasting imperial bearing, he's gigged and recorded with pegged personages like Robert Gordon, Wilko Johnson, Boz Boorer, Johnny Thunders, and Levi Dexter.

It's not difficult to dissect the many-sired Rock'n'Roll roar that inspires earthy abandon and nocturnal, hip grinding hours. Blues, Country, and Rhythm and Blues each play prominently. Easier still to throw oneself into their combined mesmeric grasp. 

But wrenching such storms from six strings, with the blood familiarity Steve so obviously possesses, is hardly on common offer. And only the emphatically cubish would turn from opportunities to savor.

Last year, Steve remastered 2013's Smokin' Guitar. It's what those hip to the tip anticipated from the RockabillyBluesSoulMan, and his Stripped-Down Stompin' Band: gut punches from rugged Rock'n'Roll territory. A corrupting beat-trove of slide-guitared dirty fun, the way taboo Rock'n'Roll (in its varied and thorny/horny countenances) sounded in its early years. And the way that it can still come over.

"I can't play in any other way than what's true to me," Steve once confessed.

Bracing and hard-lashed, "Wolf Farm (Grange Aux Loops)," "Gospel Ground," "Steel Sedan," and "Wicked Blues" are but half of the disc's stouthearted examples of what ensues when someone with true, roots-music heart and soul plugs in.

All songs bounce and drive, crazily cool, sliding and swaying wonderfully in coarsely-grained rudeness. The rollicking blast is packed out by harmonica swipes bespeaking real-world experience. 

Think of basic, guitared-juggernauts of the sort the Rolling Stones gave up, back in the day. Or early Faces.

Steve agreed with that assessment, in years-ago conversation. "I think we all drink from the same well. Obviously the Stones draw on the whole history of American music and growing up in the fifties with the development of television. I was influenced by the same things."

"I guess this type of Rhythm 'n' Blues hybrid music became 'Mid Atlantic' when I was a kid - I can't and don't want to play or sing anything except what is deep inside of me.

"For instance I don't often refer to cars, automobiles or motorcycles except in passing because I don't have a drivers license. I wouldn't sing that I was born Mississippi - but I might write about a girl in Tennessee or Las Vegas because I just spoke to her by email. It's all around us."

Steve digs that it isn't only the raucous sound but the brash attitude, the way our music makes you live and love and yell and dance and feel -- inside and out -- that won't ever go away. Can't ever go away.

He won't let it.

Videos: "Wolf Farm (Grange Aux Loops)"    "Gospel Ground"   "Steel Sedan"   "Wicked Blues (Non-Filter)"

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Back in the Day, 2002

The Ink Spots

The Golden Age of the Ink Spots - The Best of Everything

(Jasmine)

Sweetly majestic and conducive to lights-low romance, Ink Spots oeuvre was also possessed of demanding urgency. Members' crucial output, compiled on these four discs, predated Rock'n'Roll. But much of that subsequent, cross-stitched form's earthiness, titillated impulse, and optimism stepped lively in these impeccably tasteful grooves.

Personnel changed over the historic combo's duration. One account explained why many Ink Spots' songs open with the same guitar figure: Because early DJs infrequently identified bands aired, that device so advised listeners. Clever.

(A commenter on this disc's Youtube page wrote: "I'm 16, soon to be 17 years old and born in 2006. I can assure you this music will never die!")

Recommended, disc one: "Someone's Rocking My Dreamboat," "Christopher Columbus," "I'm Beginning to See the Light" (with Ella Fitzgerald), "Shout, Brother, Shout," "Swing High, Swing Low," "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire," "Slap that Bass," "Who Wouldn't Love You?," "Keep Away From My Doorstep," "Information Please"

Recommended, disc two: "I'll Never Smile Again (Until I Smile at You," "'Taint Nobody's Bizness if I Do," "This is Worth Fighting For," "What Can I Do," "It's a Sin to Tell a Lie," "Stompin' at the Savoy," "Old Joe's Hittin' the Jug," "Java Jive," "Your Feet's Too Big," "Brown Gal"

Recommended, disc three: "Foo-Gee," "With Plenty of Money and You," "I Still Feel the Same About You" (with Ella Fitzgerald), "Don't Get Around Much Any More," "Whoa Babe!," "Oh! Red," "You Were Only Fooling (While I Was Falling in Love)," "Cow-Cow Boogie" (with Ella Fitzgerald)," "If I Didn't Care," "Alabama Barbecue"

Recommended, disc four: "Mine, All Mine, My Way," "That's the Way It Is," "Nothin'," "Knock-Kneed Sal (on the Mourner's Bench)," "My Prayer," "That Cat is High," "Yes Suh!," "Pork Chops 'n Gravy," "That's Where I Came In," "I've Got a Bone to Pick with You"

Video: "I've Got a Bone to Pick with You" 

Jasmine

mercado libre

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El Vidocq (compiler)

Strip-O-Rama vol 3

(Jukebox Music Factory)

Before your mind's gutter-eye slink undraped pulchritude - mascaraed baby blues barely open and curvy pins, pillars of provocation - while the blinking Seeburg in the runway's shadow gives out with sax honks, visceral beats, and inspirations to wantonness. Sequins. Fishnets. Tassels. Pasties. Busty St. Claire shows the boys what mamas have, since time immemorial, warned them against being led astray by. Musicians across the sounds spectrum, worshipped by collectors of dusty wax on labels few recall, shout the joys of silk-sheet misbehavior. Here's to the doll parade.

Recommended: "Hardhead" (Louis Jordan), "Lookout Mountain" (Chuck Miller), "Not Much of a Future, But Man What a Past" (Bob Roubian)," "So Young" (Clyde Stacy), "Why Don't You Do Right" (Joanie Sommers), "The Coo" (Wayne Cochran), "Morgus the Magnificent" (Morgus & the Ghouls), "Well Do It" (Ella Johnson)

Videos: "Not Much of a Future, But Man What a Past"   "So Young"   "Morgus the Magnificent"   "Well Do It"

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The Shake Bombs

Originals!!!   digital album

(Self-issued)

The three sporting chrome-finned coolness, in 10 compiled razorings, evidently have zero regard for studio handstand trickery. And that's a very good feature. Eschewing audio counterfeiting leaves the roadway clear for rubbery tread scars, ones that mean nitro-powered Neo-Rockabilly's on the highway market for blond, brunette, and scarlet-tressed hitchhike dolls.

Recommended: "Baby, Put Your Coffee On," "My Big Foot Gal," "Tempe Town Blues," "Saturday Sale at the Goodwill Store," "New '35," "Pretty Baby Blue," "Smoking Hot Body"

Videos: "Baby, Put Your Coffee On"   "New '35"   "Pretty Baby Blue" (live)

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Lil' Mo & the Dynaflos

Fronted by a siren with angelic tones capacity, a trio of doo-woppers, straight from beneath some Bop Street lamp post, urge tender confederacy. Players with PHDs in hepness spin understated merriment - with saxophone piquancy - ensuring embrace.

Video: "Let's Fall in Love"

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Nick Curran: The lipstick-smeared, skull-and-crossbones rocker who screamed into that good-time night

"My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends --

It gives a lovely light!"

- Edna St, Vincent Millay

Sadly, Nick died in 2012.

I don't know whether he had any foes to speak of. I suspect not, save perhaps for lessers who envied his talents.

I never saw the man perform. I know I missed something very special, a five-alarm wildman in the raging tradition of sod-busting authentics.

Fortunately for us, audio and video documentation abound.

Like a rakish Rock'n'Roll predator, Nick constantly moved onstage. Manic. On fire. The man was possessed by wicked-fun forces - and he cast them all over ecstatic adherents.

Taut, his every sinewy muscle flexed, he thrashed his low-slung, weaponized Telecaster without quarter. Surely, no audience member protested the ear-shattering lashing; they were six fathoms deep into fracture, wallowing in dig-ification.

The raw music into which Nick breathed animation was a verdant and unashamed garden of under-the-table releases. It harked back to a primitive glory era, when stark, jaw-jutted Blues, jumpin' Rhythm and Blues, and barely out of the house Rock'n'Roll could be located in the same boisterous and bawdy joints -- patrons dressed to kill, liquored up, and more than ready for whatever and whoever midnight might visit upon them.

Little Richard, Etta James, Guitar Slim -- a host of storied worthies informed Nick's seething Rock'n'Roll. But he also packed in his own flashing, ripsaw personality.   

His last disc, 2010's "Reform School Girl" (Electro Groove), offers rich testimony of his worthy roar. A blazing and house-shaking rave up, Etta James' "Tough Lover" opens the proceedings with slamming certainty. Nick's own "Baby You Crazy," "Lusty Lil Lucy," and "Rocker" follow suit: furiously fun, knock-down cuts, jammed wall-to-wall with hip swagger.

The teen-love-in-tragedy title-cut ballad recalls the Shangri-Las (always a pleasant thought). Rough-edged road romp "Flyin' Home" features guest Phil Alvin, who characteristically imprints the value. And storming original "Psycho" is simply of such savage, sing-along, mad life as to charge unbound into the ether, a forever torch.

Nick once said that "With the music I write, I try to breathe new life into the traditional styles that I really love, using a lot of different influences from different styles of music and different eras...I always want to, not necessarily sound like something that already happened in the 50s, but something that could have happened back then, but got lost in the vaults somewhere."

He was successful in that ambition. I regret missing him onstage. But digging his waxings offers as much redress as can be had.

Videos: "Tough Lover" and "Women and Cadillacs" (both live) 

The Mean Devils

"Make Up for Lost Time" b/w "Pack 'em up, Stack 'em Up, Rack 'em Up"

(Discos Dinamite)

Now and again, one detects a Mickey and Sylvia "Love is Strange" imprint in "Make Up for Lost Time." Not nearly enough to locate the blissed-out track on copycat real estate, just enough to signal true believer literacy. Flipside "Pack" scorches treads on the Rockabilly lost highway haunted by the Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow. Calendar years are as nothing, 'cause fearsome wildcatism ain't goin' nowhere.

Videos: "Pack 'm Up, Stack 'em Up, Rack 'em Up"   "Make Up for Lost Time"   Live at Hemsby 2025 (9:08)

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Hipshot Nic

"Rattle Me" b/w "Did You Throw My Letter Away"   7" vinyl

(Wild Records Europe)

Though by now a cliche, descriptive "flat gone" applies to this Aussie wax as soundly as it once did to genre pathfinders' thick PVC platters. No one's checking characters at the 2026 door, the result being a crazy dance floor teeming with sideburned JDs, Eisenhower-endorsing first-generation tear ups, and mohawked wreckers who've belly-flopped into the Murray's Pomade deep end.

Video: "Rattle Me" (live)

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Back in the Day, 1969

Steve Cropper

With a Little Help from My Friends

(Volt - US, Stax -UK)

In Jimmy Vaughn's phrasing: Six Strings Down. 

Wednesday the third brought news that Steve Cropper had expired, departing in his 84th solar orbit.

Steve's deft stylings took him from the 1960s' Stax house band (Booker T and the MGs) - with whom he gilded way too numerous Soul/R&B gems for succinct enumeration - to recording and filming with Blues Brothers John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, to further global pinnacles unglimpsed by most.

A city cat and his country cousin slapped hands, threw their respective uptown blues and backroad bends into high-stepping frolic, and left for lucky us a plate piled high with tuneful savoriness.

By adding his writing faculty to the crafting of "Knock on Wood," "Soul Man," "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay," "Green Onions," "In the Midnight Hour" and more, he ensured his shadow would forever hover above American popular music.

Here is where the legend began its journey. A wholly instrumental work, it trained the spotlight on the man's plectrum prowess - as was only proper. Steve's manner was both judicious and adventurous; he steadily intuited how best to traverse ambitious avenues, digging the soulful capacity alurk in every meaty passage. 

A host of delights abounds. As ears are filled by sounds too cool for rules and too funky for button-down strictures, muscle memory may well answer the call, producing good-time limb gesticulations not viewed since Don Cornelius commenced the Soul Train Line. And Steve's own "The Way I Feel Tonight" is textbook belly rub stuff.

2023 witnessed an Omnivore Recordings vinyl rerelease. A digital, remastered and expanded version saw daylight in 2024.

If there be any sunshine piercing the dark cloud of a string master's sad demise, besides mourners enjoying works left behind, it is this: up-and-coming pickers can avail themselves of the inspirational example. The pick is passed. Such is the way.

Recommended: "Crop Dustin' "Land of 1000 Dances," "99 1/2," "Boo-Ga-Loo Down Broadway," "Funky Broadway," "With a Little Help from My Friends," "Oh Pretty Woman," "I'd Rather Drink Muddy Water," "The Way I Feel Tonight," "In the Midnight Hour," "Rattlesnake"

Videos: "Crop Dustin'"   "99 1/2"  "Boo-Ga-Loo Down Broadway"    "I'd Rather Drink Muddy Water"   "The Way I Feel Tonight"

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Back in the Day, 1981

Dave Edmunds

twangin'...

(Swan Song)

Some cuts came into being whilst Rockpile was extant. Members assist mate Dave, as they had on his previous Repeat When Necessary. Also present are outtakes hailing from jams previous. ("Baby Let's Play House" dates from a 1968 session.) Such is the immaculate Pop shimmer of "It's Been So Long" that Ray-Ban cheaters are advised. The Wicked Pickett's "Three Time Loser" is stepped up a bit, though Dave's reading retains the original's determination. General appraisal turns up jocular outings of crisp vintage, slid betwixt tunes culled from Elysium's Seeburg. 

Significant is Dave's free-skimming recollection of George Jones's 1964 "The Race is On." Backing him here are the Stray Cats, whose own debut full-length was produced by Dave the same year.

Recommended: "It's Been So Long," "Singin' the Blues," "(I'm Gonna Start Living Again) If It Kills Me," "Almost Saturday Night," "Cheap Talk, Patter, and Jive," "Three Time Loser," "You'll Never Get Me Up (in One of Those)," "I'm Only Human," "The Race is On," "Baby Let's Play House"

Videos: "It's Been So Long"   "(I'm Gonna Start Living Again (If it Kills Me"   "Three Time Loser"   "I'm Only Human"

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Mike Sanchez with the Drew Davies Rhythm Combo feat. Big Boy Bloater

Hey Now!

(Doopin)

Bubbling up and over is R&B that keeps listeners on toe tips. Grab a party chick and dive in. There can be no stopping ivories in the grip of the spirit. Brassy interjections punch up proceedings. And the titular star himself looses stentorian musings in a style that indicates a thousand and one nights gloriously spent. 

Recommended: "Lydia," "Boogie Oogie," "Cadillac Song," "Hey Now!," "I Need a Woman," "The Kokomo," "Mad Girl," "Keep Turning Me On," "What Can I Do?," "Safronia B," "Lula," "She's Gone Away But..."

Videos: "Boogie Oogie" (live)   "Mad Girl"   "Safronia B" (live)   "I Need a Woman"

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Back in the Day, 1963

Etta James

...Rocks the House

(Argo Records)

The drabness of interchangeable corporate cut-outs like Nikki Minaj and Cardi B is forced into sharp relief by R&B/Soul paragon Miss Etta. This was her first live vinyl, recorded in Nashville, and her gifts were at full capacity. When she belted out, when she reared back and let fly her characteristic back-of-throat growl, every table shook. She required neither auto-tune nor recorded vocal track to which she could lip-sync whilst cavorting. No robotic dance troupe or costume changes, either; her real-world music was sufficient. 

At the board with Chess Records founder Leonard Chess, she ensured her sound was portrayed with every ounce of its natural splendor. 

Providing Etta with the stout platform she merited were David T. Walker (guitar), Marion Wright (bass), drummers Richard Water and Freeman Brown, Vonzell Cooper (organ), and tenor sax-man Garnell Cooper.

Re-releases have been marketed by numerous labels, in the U.S. and abroad.

Recommended: "Something's Got a Hold on Me," "Baby, What You Want Me To Do," "What'd I Say," "Money (That's What I Want)," "Seven Day Fool," "Sweet Little Angel," "Ooh Poo Pah Doo," "Woke Up This Morning," "Ain't That Loving You Baby," "All I Could Do Was Cry," "I Just Want to Make Love to You"

Videos: "Something's Got a Hold on Me"   "Sweet Little Angel"   

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Back in the Day, 1959

King Curtis

Have Tenor Sax, Will Blow

(ATCO)

It mattered not upon which stylistic avenue the man's shadow fell, he proved himself the hip-dipping master of each. Numbers divergent shared melodic blood. King Curtis jammed with marquee names on nightspot stages and in more formal studio circumstances. But, as impactful as those efforts were, some of his finest hot-and-cold moves can be located on his own waxings. This is his first. And in passages invigorating and understatedly eloquent, King Curtis unveiled talent due celebration.

Recommended: "Midnight Ramble," "Linda," "The Shake," "Jay Walk," "Lil Brother," "Peter Gunn," "The Groove," "Snake Eyes," "Cuban Twilight," "Birth of the Blues," "Chill"

Videos: "Midnight Ramble"   "Lil Brother"   "The Groove"   "Cuban Twilight"

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With the Shirelles.

Back in the Day, 2016

Benny & the Flybyniters

The Many Sides of...

(Rhythm Bomb Records)

Come in from the alley to the dancehall. He and she couplings dressed to kill are whirling with cool aplomb. The combo arrayed onstage are aces, all, pumping out raw R&B in the manner of storied icons. Edges are appropriately unsanded, for this is honking, strutting human music that has soundtracked innumerable noctunal interactions, and it should be this real.

Here compiled are swing-out blasts from earlier issuances; if they are not already in your stack, lunge for this.

Recommended: "Straighten Up Mama," "Two-Dollar Woman," "The Way You Do," "Jet-Propelled Daddy," "Benny's Bounce," "Party Like Never Before," "She Knocks Me Out," "Huckle Boogie," "Hey Now," "Tell Me Pretty Baby," "Hammerhead," "Loosen Up"

Videos: "Two-Dollar Woman"    "Benny's Bounce"   "Party Like Never Before"

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Doctor Velvet

New Breed   vinyl LP

(Wap Shoo Wap Records)

Apparent from the sounding is that these Netherlands finger-popping perpetrators enjoyed well-spent youth carousing in an old-school R&B 'hood where righteous rhythms, stank guitar articulations, bold brass, and keyboard paradings - crowned by been-through-travails vocals that still find reason to exult - swing down the late-night boulevard. (And "Put the Hurt On Me" discloses J. Geils lyrical shadow - see "Homework.")

Recommended: "City Jungle," "Messed Up," "Blue Moon Caravan," "Bad Luck Baby," "Fool's Desire," "Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere," "Put the Hurt On Me," "I'm Crying"

Video: "Messed Up"   "Bad Luck Baby"   "Put the Hurt On Me" (live)

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