THE PACKAGE

The first song on the first solo album by Curtis Mayfield is "(Don't Worry) If there's a Hell Below We're All Going to Go". It's a whopper, a jam and a half. Fu-huck yeah. It starts out kinda quiet with fuzz bass and a woman saying that people should start reading the Book of Revelations, ho-hum, but then the congas seep in, okay, so now we're moving. Then Mayfield, with heavy echo, comes in, "Sisters! Niggers! Whities! Jews! Crackers! Don't worry, if there's a hell below, we're all gonna go!", followed by a scream, and then the thing just takes off. It's got everything you could ask for. strings and horns playing off each and that glorious wah-wah. As close to ground zero of the classic blaxsploitation sound as it gets. ("Shaft"? Get out of town. This is a year before Isaac Haye's signature song.) And it's probably Mayfield doing the fret to pedal work, being that he did when it was played live. The drums? Shit, that funky beat is unrelenting. As are the congas, bongos and the heavy, heavy bass line. As amazing as the song is, it's but one on an LP that is similarly packed with thick layers of psychedelic soul (listen to "Move On Up"). And all of this written, sung, and produced by Mayfield after a successful run with the Impressions and his own record label.

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Listen:
Curtis Mayfield - (Don't Worry) If there's a Hell Below We're All Going to Go mp3 at Internet Archive
Curtis Mayfield - Move On Up mp3 at SGS (?)

THE NEIGHBOR LADY'S FIRST SOUL RECORD

Last night I was just down the block walking home when a van pulled up halfway into a driveway, with the ass end of it blocking the sidewalk. The engine shut off, the side door rolled open and you could hear Curtis Mayfield's "Move On Up" wafting through the air. So I wasn't pissed that my path was blocked. As I walked around the van, I said to the driver in the darkness "I like your music". A woman answered, "I love Curtis Mayfield. This was my first soul record." No exclamation marks, no attempt to make a big deal out if it. She was practically cooing. So when I got home I was in the mood. I went looking for some of his stuff, hopefully stuff that I wasn't overly familiar with.

The one of these that stopped me dead in my tracks was the demo for "Ghetto Child". Fuzz, lots of it, starting at 1:35, and other cleaner guitar interplay. It sounds like a very lean, bare bones Isaac Hayes jam. I could use a bunch more of demos like that one.

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Listen:
Curtis Mayfield - Ghetto Child (demo) mp3 at So Well Remembered
Curtis Mayfield - Move On Up mp3 at S6S (?)
Curtis Mayfield - Mighty Might Spade and Whitey (live) mp3 at AMPS (?)
With the Impressions:
The Impressions - Choice of Colors mp3 at Beware of the Blog
The Impressions - People Get Ready mp3 at Leave You Wanting Less

SKITTLES

Lester Chambers, former member of the Chambers Brothers, was attacked on stage tonight, after dedicating "People Get Ready" to Trayvon Martin. His son Dylan Chambers posted on Facebook eight hours ago that he was on his way to the hospital. More about this sad event can be found here. So, crazy lady attacking a seventy year old man, I'm right here, and this is dedicated to Trayvon Martin.

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Listen:
Curtis Mayfield - People Get Ready mp3 at Leave Them Wanting More
Visit:
Classic Rock Muasician Lester Chambers Assaulted at Blues Festival at Examiner.com

TURN OFF EVERYTHING ELSE

Today was cool.  I happened to hear Curtis Mayfield's "Move On Up" while driving around, and, yeah I've heard it a million times, but it was one to those periodic not as distracted as usual moments, when you can pick a song apart.  Let me tell you right now, "Move On Up" has a lot going on in it. The drums, the horns, the bongos, the strings, the bass.  It made my day. The icing was running into "Junkie Chase", an instrumental from the Superfly film score. Holy shit, this song is just as populated as the other. I gotta cut it off right here, I see where it's headed. This isn't the end of this. I'll return to Mayfield again, believe me.  Four songs and a paragraph of my space filling drivel does not do this subject justice. Just dig these to better your day.

Vintage Soul Train. Hard to argue with that song title.

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Listen:
Curtis Mayfield - Move On Up mp3 at Indie Shuffle
Curtis Mayfield - Junkie Chase mp3 at The Cargo Culte
The Impressions - People Get Ready mp3 at Friday Mix Tape
The Impressions - This Is My Country mp3 at Rock Town Hall

CURTIS MAYFIELD & THE HEAVY

I'm as guilty of it as anybody: the practice of describing a band as "(band name) meets (band name)", usually referencing bands with disparate sounds. Descriptions like that are rarely accurate to anyone but the person doing the describing. But, more often than not, I fall for them. So when visiting Some Velvet Blog, I read "damn hot engaging musical intersection where Muddy Waters meets Prince, where big Zep beats meet The Stooges, where Sly and The Family meet the Son of Superfly," I'm slobbering before I've finished reading the sentence. I'm off to the races. So it's no surprise that I missed the last key reference: Superfly. (As in "Superfly," the song by Curtis Mayfield, from the soundtrack to the film of the same name.)

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So, I'm already downloading and wondering why the guy didn't reference Curtis Mayfield. I'm thinking, "Prince? Stooges? Okay, it's bombastic like Led Zep, but that's not Prince I'm hearing"; finally settling on Mayfield's "Freddy's Dead" as the missing ingredient. When I returned to the blog to see if the mp3 was still live, and reread the text, boy, did I feel like a dip. All that aside, "Coleen," followed by "Freddy's Dead" passed the CD Mix Challenge. And the Heavy are throwing a lot in there.

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The Heavy - Coleen mp3 and That Kind of Man video at Some Velvet Blog
Curtis Mayfield - Freddy's Dead mp3 (and others) at the Leather Canary
The Heavy - That Kind of Man mp3 at Anyone's Guess
The Heavy at MySpace
Curtis Mayfield profile at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame