Music
James Hines is one of the more fascinating figures of funk and soul – a six-foot-seven, 300-pound, legally blind albino guitarist, producer, composer who became a preacher after getting his sight back.
You know when your eccentric auntie drinks a bit too much sherry at Christmas and embarrasses everyone by singing along to a record and dancing around the tree?
This came out in 1977 when I was pogoing in a seedy cellar somewhere to a snotty young band that sounded nothing like this. But if you love soppy soul ballads, with a sweet singer emoting at the top of his range and backing vocalists echoing his heartfelt words back at him, then this is for you.
This has to be one of the most impassioned vocals of all time, Nelson Sanders’s sobbing, heartfelt interpretation of the song title – I’m Lonely.
I don’t think I ever heard the name Levi Stubbs until Billy Bragg wrote and sang a song in the mid-Eighties called Levi Stubbs’ Tears. Even then I doubt I realised who he was.
Not just a deep cut – this psych-garage gem is positively subterranean. And I’m only posting it for the title. It’s rubbish, of course, but I’m intrigued by what little I know of the perpetrators, The Driving Stupid.
How great is this soul ballad?! That organ! Those vocals! You can just picture a disco at the end of the night in the late Sixties with young men awkwardly trying to smooch embarrassed girls on the dance floor as the DJ drops this tune.
Tom Verlaine of Television has died, aged 73.
Earl Van Dyke was never a household name but he was one of the key figures in the success of Motown in the Sixties.
I first heard The Tonettes on a vast box set anthology of Stax/Volt singles… though they were called The Charmels at that point. This was their first single – and the second to come out on Volt in early 1962.