The O'Jays--"Ship Ahoy"

From Ship Ahoy (Philidelphia International: 1973/ Sony: 2003).

The O’Jays inhabit a privileged position in the Great Old Soul pantheon. They employed much of the same lush instrumentation and smooth production of the Philadelphia groove, but they didn’t shy away from introducing new sounds and Big Ideas. 1973’s “Ship Ahoy,” a sprawling nine-minute track from the album of the same name, is an equally hypnotic and challenging song that forms the thematic crux of a markedly direct and political record from a group who’d topped the charts a year before with “Love Train.”

“Ship Ahoy” emerges out of punishing tides and creaking timbers, the relentless crack of a whip punctuates a repetitive minor key vamp over a dirge-like beat. The idea, as expressed by songwriters Leon Huff and Kenny Gamble, is a musical nod to slave ship’s middle passage, builds through vocal harmonies, the introduction of a pealing psychedelic guitar, a chorus of strings and the shouting of horns. Eddie Levert’s vocals soar over the arrangement both beseeching and resigned. This isn’t a game. This is no sugar-sweet metaphor for a failed romance. This is soul taken to a place few soul singers had ever taken it before. And this, byt way, several years before “Roots” made talking about the slave trade safe for popular media

Ernesto Lechner of Rolling Stone probably summed it up best in his 2003 review of the reissue: “Ship Ahoy's main achievement was proving that it was indeed possible to be thoughtful and articulate without losing your funk.” If only that were always the case.


You can hear the song in entirety here, though the accompanying fan-made video is a bit rough.

Ray Price--"Nightlife"

From Night Life (Columbia: 1963/ Koch: 1996)

A haunting ballad pitting jazz chords against a Nashville guitar, the Willie Nelson-penned title track of Ray Price’s 1962 album is just the sort of tune you expect to hear playing (anachronistically, perhaps) on a jukebox in an Edward Hopper painting. Listen to Price’s soaring tenor as he resigns himself to the sins and frustrations of a troubled nocturnal existence and imagine the blue and red neon of seedy redneck bars reflected on the rainy sidewalks of some nameless southern city in the middle of the last century. “The night life ain’t no good life, but it’s my life.” Indeed. And I won’t even make a vampire jokes.

See here for a good 1981 live performance of the song, although I'm partial to the old one.

Aretha Franklin--"Drown in My Tears"

From I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You (Atlantic: 1967/ Rhino: 1995).

Interesting that the second track on Aretha’s star-making Atlantic debut should be, essentially, a torch song, on an album largely considered to be ground zero for “don’t give me no lip” female empowerment anthems. Famously recorded by Ray Charles for the same label eleven years before, “Drown In My Own Tears” represents a meeting between the young Aretha, who had been signed to Columbia in the early sixties and groomed to be a new Dinah Washington, and the slightly older and wiser Queen of Soul, who’d been heartily encouraged to incorporate the soaring gospel of her youth into a pop template. It’s redundant, at this point, to say that Aretha has at her disposal one of the greatest instruments in the history of recorded music. This song, melodramatic as it may be, highlights some of the sparks in that magnificent voice. I daresay Puccini himself could hardly make tears more operatic.

Give it a listen.

Little Joy--"Evaporar"

From Little Joy (Rough Trade: 2008)

I should hate this on principle. A side project initiated by Strokes drummer and Drew Barrymore Dump-ee Fab Moretti, a sometime Devendra Banhart collaborator named Binki Shapiro and a peripatetic Brazillian musician named Rodrigo Amarante.

Though I admit to enjoying the Strokes first record in those lazy, hazy post 9/11 days of 2001, Moretti has done little to endear himself to me since then, discounting his participation in the two sub-par follow-ups to “Is This It?” and regular appearances in the “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” section in US Weekly. And anyone associated with hirsute warbler Banhart is naturally suspect to me (that includes Natalie Portman, by the way).

But the album isn’t bad. An easily digestible mix of indie pop and Bossa Nova, about the worst thing you can say about it is that it tonally resembles much of M.O.R indie rock these days—a little too precious, a little too harmless, a little too willing to charm the pants off a sorority girl in a Shins T-shirt. All that said, the last track, “Evaporar” is a lovely four minute field-trip to Bahia that comes off like a forgotten acoustic Joao Gilberto demo to remind you resident of the chilly Northern Hemisphere that it’s spring in Salvador.

Here's a little taste.

New Order--"Ceremony"

From Movement Collector’s Edition (Warner/Rhino: 2008)

This November 11 marks the eighty-ninth iteration of Veteran’s Day for my fellow USians. It was a holiday first proposed by Woodrow Wilson in honor of the young soldiers of the Lost Generation who gave their to the first World War etc. etc. I’ll resist the urge to comment from either a current (and we’re still in Iraq) or historical (Johnny Come Lately) perspective and say simply that the government closures due to the federal holiday may have lost me a day of mail but won me a new kitten (long story). This year, at least, I’m square with Veteran’s Day.

This 11/11 also brings the U.S. release of Warner’s expanded, double-disc New Order reissues, hot off the presses, glossy-sleeved and probably, in our current, execrable economy, unnecessary for all but those pitiful ones of us who know every word to every song on the original albums (mine were cassettes) plus both discs of “Substance.”

My own re-purchase of Movement today (the third, for those playing at home) kept me stuck in my office listening to “Ceremony” (on disc B) for what has got to be at least the 400th time, watching the autumn sky fade to twilight and still, after all these years, feeling the dizzy, weightless sensation at the repetition of those first ten notes (hum along if you like). The quick, pinch of Stephen Morris’s drums and the first unsteady moments when you hear Bernard Sumner becoming Bernard Sumner, as opposed to simply aping Ian Curtis.

“Ceremony” was written before Curtis’ death in May of 1980, produced by Martin Hannett and in many ways, it is a Joy Division song. But there’s something else going on. A mood, perhaps. It would be foolish to call it hopeful; after all, this is a song whose first line of lyric speaks of unnerving events. However, there’s a space to this song. A wide-open, major-keyed landscape that speaks to that which is coming, as opposed to that which has passed. It’s true that this song is weighted down in pop mythology—the death of Ian Curtis, the sound of New Order being born. It’s also true that this song would probably earn a chapter heading in my personal musical autobiography. I can still feel the ringing in my ears from playing this song at ludicrous volume while speeding down the river road in my hometown, smoking illicit cigarettes my junior year of high school. But there’s something to be said for that kind of nostalgia. The memory of promise may not play out the same way sixteen years later, but it certainly adds something to a sunny small town November in a nation still reeling in the promise of its most recent election.

For a trip down nostalgia lane (and a somewhat endearing, early live version), see here.