A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, July 16, 2016
Eugene McDaniels (1935-2011): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, singer, songwriter, lyricist, orchestrator, producer, ensemble leader, and teacher
SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SUMMER, 2016
VOLUME THREE NUMBER ONE
MARY LOU WILLIAMS
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of: JULIUS HEMPHILL June 18-24 ARTHUR BLYTHE June 25-July 1 OSCAR BROWN, JR. July 2-July 8
Last
night I was playing a deeply cherished and recently purchased ALBUM (as
in real VINYL folks) of a revolutionary 1970 recording by one of my all
time favorite musical artists and singer/songwriters of the 1960-1980
era, the legendary Eugene McDaniels (popularly known as 'the Left Reverend Mac D' in
honor of both his radical politics and fiery and dynamic downhome
delivery of his amazing lyrics). The author of such original, highly
influential and profound song classics (and hits!) of the '60s and '70s
as 'Compared To What', 'Feel Like Making Love', 'A Hundred Pounds of
Clay', and 'Tower of Strength' among many others, McDaniels was a
formidable musical composer, arranger, song stylist, producer, and
songwriter whose diverse and eclectic mastery of Jazz, Classical, Folk,
Blues, R and B, and Gospel forms and styles made him a highly esteemed
member of an absolutely extraordinary Golden Age of musicians who also
happened to be singers and songwriters of the 1960s and '70s period
which included such iconic peers and giants as Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell,
Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield, Bill Withers, Carole King, Sam Cooke,
Gil-Scott Heron, Terry Callier, Aretha Franklin, Laura Nyro, Jimi
Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone, Smokey Robinson, Paul
Simon, Jim Webb, and Janet Ian (!)...
Anyway as I was lovingly taking the classic 1970 album by McDaniels entitled 'OUTLAW'
out of its jacket I casually remarked to my wife "I wonder whatever
happened to Eugene McDaniels. He was a ****genius!" So after listening
once again transfixed to a recording that I was originally so fascinated
and delighted by in college when it first appeared that I wore out
three different copies of it over the next decade, I decided out of now
intense curiosity that I would google his name on my computer and I
immediately came across the news that he had just died last month in Los
Angeles on August 1 at the age of 76. Initially shocked I went on to
read his obit and saw that he had lived a long, satisfying, and
creatively productive life well beyond the much deserved but temporary
fame and adulation that he found in the 1960s and '70s, and that he was
survived by a loving wife, six children (one named Dylan), a sister, and
nine grandchildren and I felt even more elated and proud that I had
always been and remained such an enthralled fan and dedicated listener
to his timeless music and song lyrics, many of which I have reprinted
below along with a discography and inspiring videos of his outstanding
performances on YouTube. So Enjoy!
Oh...and one more thing: I
would like to publicly thank the famed retail music store AMOEBA RECORDS
here in Berkeley, California for once again making the 'Left Reverend
Mac D's' classic recordings on the Atlantic label generally available
once again. I am especially gratified personally because I did not still
own and had not heard a complete recording of OUTLAW in over 20 years
until I purchased it again some six months ago at AMOEBA. I remain
humbly in their debt and especially that of Mr. McDaniels whose
magnificent music and songs will thankfully never die...So RIP
brotherman Mac D. We love you...
Songwriter
Eugene McDaniels (1935-2011) talks about his hit song "Compared to
What" Recorded by Les McCann and Eddie Harris in 1969. Recently recorded
in 2010 by John Legend and The Roots, with 278 different recorded versions in between. Imaged and edited by Dennis Collins Johnson and Grace Peirce.
COMPARED TO WHAT? (Lyrics and music by Eugene McDaniels) 1969
[First recorded and immortalized on the LP Swiss Movement (1970) by Les McCann and Eddie Harris]: Love the lie and lie the love Hanging on, with push and shove
Possession is the motivation
That is hangin' up the goddamn nation Looks like we always end up in a rut
Everybody now!
Tryin' to make it real, compared to what? Come on baby, now
Slaughter houses are killin' hogs Twisted children are killin' frogs Poor dumb rednecks rollin' logs Tired old ladies, kissin' dogs I hate the human love of that stinkin' mutt
I can't use it!
Tryin' to make it real, compared to what Come on baby, now
The President, he's got his war Folks don't know just what it's for Nobody gives us rhyme or reason Have one doubt, they call it treason We chicken feathers all without one gut
Goddammit! Tryin' to make it real, compared to what? Sock it to me!
Church on Sunday, sleep and nod Trying to duck the wrath of God Preachers fillin' us with fright They all trying to teach us with what they think is right They really got to be some kind of stupid nut
I can't use it!
Tryin' to make it real, compared to what Lover, baby, hey
Where's that bee and where's that honey Where's my god and where's my money Unreal values, a crass distortion Unwed mothers need abortion Kinda brings to mind ol' young King Tut
(He did it now)
Tryin' to make it real, compared to what?
August 1, 2011 Eugene McDaniels, Singer-Songwriter of Soul and Blues, Dies at 76 By DENNIS HEVESI New York Times Eugene
McDaniels, whose mellifluous voice brought him high onto the Billboard
charts several times in the early 1960s, and who wrote “Feel Like Makin’
Love,” which Roberta Flack took to the top of the charts in 1974, died
on Friday at his home in Kittery Point, Me. He was 76.
He died after a brief illness, his wife, Karen, said.
With
his four-octave range, Gene McDaniels, as he was first professionally
known, hit No. 3 in the spring of 1961 with “A Hundred Pounds of Clay”
and No. 5 later that year with “Tower of Strength.” He last hit the Top
40 with “Spanish Lace” in late 1962.
Mr. McDaniels’s songs,
including those he wrote for other artists later in his career, jumped
from jazz to blues to ballads to gospel and could be peppered with
cultural criticism and political protest.
The lyrics of his
bluesy up-tempo song “Compared to What,” recorded live at the Montreux
Jazz Festival in 1969 by the pianist and singer Les McCann and the
saxophonist Eddie Harris, include:
“The president, he’s got his war
Folks don’t know just what it’s for
Nobody gives us rhyme or reason
Have one doubt, they call it treason”
After
hitting No. 1 in 1974, Ms. Flack’s rendition of Mr. McDaniels’s
swooning “Feel Like Makin’ Love” (“Strollin’ in the park, watchin’
winter turn to spring/Walking in the dark, seein’ lovers do their
thing”) was nominated for a Grammy. It has since been covered by
numerous artists.
Eugene Booker McDaniels was born in Kansas
City, Kan., on Feb. 12, 1935, to Booker and Louise McDaniels. The family
later moved to Omaha, where his father was a minister.
Gene sang
in the church choir, became enthralled by jazz, attended the Omaha
Conservatory of Music and moved to Los Angeles when he was 19. There he
began as a solo singer before meeting and performing with his jazz idol,
Mr. McCann. That led to his signing with Liberty Records.
Later
in his career Mr. McDaniels became a producer for, among others, the
organist Jimmy Smith and the singers Nancy Wilson and Merry Clayton.
Mr.
McDaniels’s first two marriages ended in divorce. Besides his wife, the
former Karen Thompson, he is survived by five sons, London McDaniels,
Christopher McDaniels, Django McDaniels, Mateo McDaniels and Dylan
Patterson; a daughter, Dali McDaniels; a sister, Patricia Nichols; and
nine grandchildren.
Although Mr. McDaniels was absent from the
charts as a performer after the early 1960s, his writing continued to
leave its mark. His
songs “have substantial melodies and rich, useful harmonies,” Don
Heckman wrote in The New York Times in 1970, adding that it was
“difficult to think of any other composer since Bob Dylan who has
managed so well to find musical expression for the swirling cultural
currents that envelop us.”
Gene McDaniels dies at 76; pop singer and songwriter The
pop star first found fame as a singer and later, as a producer and
songwriter for other artists. He continued to work in the music industry
throughout his life and was recently in the process of creating another
album. August 02, 2011| By Dennis McLellan Los Angeles Times
Gene
McDaniels, who emerged as a pop singing star in the early 1960s with
hits such as "A Hundred Pounds of Clay" and "Tower of Strength" and a
decade later wrote Roberta Flack's No. 1 hit "Feel Like Makin' Love,"
has died. He was 76.McDaniels,
whose career included many years as both a songwriter and a record
producer, died Friday at his home in Kittery Point, Maine, after a short
illness, said his wife, Karen"I
put him as the second-greatest thing I ever heard," jazz musician and
vocalist Les McCann told The Times on Monday. The greatest, he said, is
Aretha Franklin.McCann hired McDaniels as the first singer in his band in Los Angeles in the late 1950s."I
couldn't believe we had someone that good, that young, in our band,"
McCann said. "We were all young and being creative and developing our
talents. Someone picked him out and said, 'Let's make you a star.' "After
signing with Liberty Records, McDaniels scored his first major hit in
1961 with "A Hundred Pounds of Clay," which reached No. 3 on the
Billboard chart.Liberty reportedly
wasn't quite prepared for the single's immediate success and did not
release publicity photos of McDaniels for about six months. Many fans
initially had no idea he was black until they saw him performing on
stage."People were amazed. That
really tickled me," McDaniels recalled in a 1994 interview with the Los
Angeles Sentinel. At the time of the record's release, he said, having
throngs of teenage white girls swooning over a black singer would not
have been tolerated."If I had been white, I could have been a matinee idol," he said. "But being black, that was taboo."McDaniels' other '60s hits included "Tower of Strength," "Chip Chip," "Point of No Return" and "Spanish Lace."By the late '60s, McDaniels' pop stardom had diminished, but by then he was carving out a reputation as a songwriter.McCann
had a big hit with the McDaniels-written "Compared to What," a song on
McCann and Eddie Harris' 1969 album "Swiss Movement."McCann
had recorded the song, an up-tempo social commentary, a few years
earlier, but it had made no impact. Not so the second time around."When
it was really a hit, we'd walk on stage, and they'd yell out 'Compared
to What!' One night I said, 'Let's see if we can get by not playing it,'
and we got booed. It's an amazing song. I do that song at least twice a
night, and I still love it. All of his songs were fantastic.""Compared
to What" has shown up in eight movies, including "Casino," and was
featured in an international Coca-Cola campaign. More recently, it was
included on the 2010 John Legend and the Roots album "Wake Up!"In
the early '70s, Atlantic Records released McDaniels' albums "Outlaw"
and "Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse," for which he wrote or co-wrote
the songs."They were very political albums, and they got him kicked off his label," his wife said.Flack's
1974 recording of McDaniels' "Feel Like Makin' Love" reached No. 1 on
the Billboard chart and was nominated for two Grammys. McDaniels wrote
many songs for Flack.McDaniels'
songs have been recorded by singers including Aretha Franklin, Nancy
Wilson, Donny Hathaway, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Johnny Mathis and
Ray Charles. He also produced for artists, including Flack, Knight,
Lenny Williams and Melba Moore.The
son of a minister, Eugene B. McDaniels was born Feb. 12, 1935, in Kansas
City, Kan., and grew up in Omaha, where he began singing in his
father's church as a young boy.He
formed a gospel quartet in junior high school and, while idolizing jazz
singers, including Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan, launched his career
after graduating from high school.Karen McDaniels said her husband recently had been working on a new CD, "Humans Being."Retirement wasn't on his agenda."Never,"
she said. "He couldn't retire because he was always writing music.
Everything was about the music, always. It was his soul, his essence
completely."In addition to Karen,
his third wife, McDaniels is survived by his sons, London, Christopher,
Mateo, Django and Dylan; his daughter, Dali; his sister, Pat Nichols;
and nine grandchildren.dennis.mclellan@latimes.com http://denisesullivan.com/2011/07/31/the-outlaw-the-left-rev-mcd-and-musical-warrior-eugene-mcdaniels-rip-1935-2011/
Keep On Pushing: Black Power Music From Blues to Hip-Hop by Denise Sullivan Lawrence Hill Books, 2011
Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse by Eugene McDaniels (1971)--Atlantic Records
JULY 31, 2011
The Outlaw, The Left Rev. McD, and Musical Warrior, Eugene McDaniels, RIP 1935-2011
A Tribute by Denise Sullivan
The
music of Gene McDaniels was a big inspiration to me before, during and
after the writing of Keep on Pushing: In many ways he and his largely
untold story was the motivation to write a book that provides not only
an overview of intersections between music and social and political
movement, but takes a close look at some of the artists/activists who
were undermined by a climate and culture ultimately unequipped to
support their visionary work. And yet, rare groove chasers know well the
name Eugene McDaniels; his 1971 album for Atlantic, Headless Heroes of
the Apocalypse is a standard-bearer for psychedelic soul/funk/jazz
rhythms and is borrowed frequently for its samples (most famously by the
Beastie Boys in “Get It Together”). The album is a fierce statement of
black pride, anger, and frustration, equally powered by a super-soul
fever, peace, and ultimately love. It’s a showcase for McDaniels breadth
as a composer, from folky singer-songwriter styles (“Susan Jane”) to
proto-rap (“Supermarket Blues”); McDaniels’s strongest words are
demonstrations of righteous indignation, though he also offers spiritual
ideas.
The Lord is black, his mood is in the rain,
The people have called he’s coming to make corrections
You can hear his voice blowin’ in the wind
McDaniels is the composer of “Compared to What,”
the 1969 jazz-soul wartime protest made famous by Les McCann and Eddie
Harris: “Possession is the motivation that’s hangin’ up the goddam
nation.” McDaniels was born in Kansas City in 1935, studied at the Omaha
Conservatory of Music, and graduated from Omaha University. After
forming a band in the 1950s, he signed with Liberty Records and hit in
1961 with “A Hundred Pounds of Clay,” followed by five more Top 40 hits,
including “Tower of Strength.” All in all, McDaniels had six Top 40
records in 1961 and 1962 before he turned his focus to writing (he
worked closely with Roberta Flack and ultimately wrote her hit “Feel
Like Making Love,” among others). By the time he attempted to launch his
solo career as a singing and songwriting artist, McDaniels had had the
time to chew on what he wanted to say and had an intensely unique way of
saying it. He was fearless with his melodies and in his verses. The
instrumentation was a wild combination of folk-funk: electric and
acoustic bass rubbed against guitar, drums, and piano, and they all
combined with lyrics that strike chords of deep recognition. With the
fascist-fighting folker’s impeccable style of oration, he injects the
song with theatrical and emotional soul power. As he sings, he evokes
images of a man increasingly incensed and so confused by injustice that
he’s stretched to the point of losing his mind. His elegy for the red
man, “The Parasite (For Buffy),” dedicated to Sainte-Marie, is a shining
example of his dramaturgical song style that places his subjects in a
social, political and psychological context. But McDaniels’s revolution
of the mind is a peaceful one; though he paints pictures of hell and all
hell breaking loose, his narrator does not advocate use of violence as a
solution. Rather, violence is portrayed as the problem. “Supermarket
Blues” describes a situation in which a man demands his money back for a
can of peas marked as pineapple and ends up with a beating. Somehow he
even finds a way to inject dark humor into the mess: “I wish I’d stayed
home and got high instead of coming into the street and having this
awful fight.” Whatever darkness he’s describing, McDaniels’s point of
view remains poised and unique; his higher consciousness and
keep-on-pushing spirit bleeds between the notes of each slyly rendered
gospel-laced track. Years later, the white-rapping,
Tibetan-Freedom-loving Beastie Boys would turn to McDaniels, nicknamed
the Left Rev McD, for a sample, as would the Afro-centric, conscious
hip-hoppers, A Tribe Called Quest. Last year, John Legend and the Roots
brought back a version of “Compared to What.”
During the course
of the five years I was writing and researching Keep on Pushing, I
attempted to reach McDaniels a number of times, hoping he would answer
some of my questions about his early ’70s work and the mysterious
stories of conspiracy and suppression that surround it, though my
requests remained unanswered. In the book, I attempted to unravel his
story the best I could, the facts based on bits and pieces from
pre-existing interviews, including information passed on by Pat Thomas
who reissued Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse and its predecessor, The
Outlaw. With little information available to me, in the end, I came to
my own conclusions about McDaniels and his exceptional work, the kind
of music that reaches inside, touches the soul, and alters it. The Left
Rev. McD made a difference, and mercifully the music remains, though his
presence will be missed: Eugene McDaniels made it real—no comparison.
Eugene McDaniels, Singer-Songwriter of Soul and Blues, Dies at 76
Eugene McDaniels,
whose mellifluous voice brought him high onto the Billboard charts
several times in the early 1960s, and who wrote “Feel Like Makin’ Love,”
which Roberta Flack took to the top of the charts in 1974, died on
Friday at his home in Kittery Point, Me. He was 76.
He died after a brief illness, his wife, Karen, said.
With his four-octave range, Gene McDaniels, as he was first professionally known, hit No. 3 in the spring of 1961 with “A Hundred Pounds of Clay” and No. 5 later that year with “Tower of Strength.” He last hit the Top 40 with “Spanish Lace” in late 1962.
Mr.
McDaniels’s songs, including those he wrote for other artists later in
his career, jumped from jazz to blues to ballads to gospel and could be
peppered with cultural criticism and political protest.
The lyrics of his bluesy up-tempo song “Compared to What,”
recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1969 by the pianist and
singer Les McCann and the saxophonist Eddie Harris, include:
“The president, he’s got his war
Folks don’t know just what it’s for
Nobody gives us rhyme or reason
Have one doubt, they call it treason”
Eugene McDaniels in 1994.Credit
John Ewing/Portland Newspapers, via Associated Press
After hitting No. 1 in 1974, Ms. Flack’s rendition of Mr. McDaniels’s swooning “Feel Like Makin’ Love”
(“Strollin’ in the park, watchin’ winter turn to spring/Walking in the
dark, seein’ lovers do their thing”) was nominated for a Grammy. It has
since been covered by numerous artists.
Eugene
Booker McDaniels was born in Kansas City, Kan., on Feb. 12, 1935, to
Booker and Louise McDaniels. The family later moved to Omaha, where his
father was a minister.
Gene
sang in the church choir, became enthralled by jazz, attended the Omaha
Conservatory of Music and moved to Los Angeles when he was 19. There he
began as a solo singer before meeting and performing with his jazz
idol, Mr. McCann. That led to his signing with Liberty Records.
Later
in his career Mr. McDaniels became a producer for, among others, the
organist Jimmy Smith and the singers Nancy Wilson and Merry Clayton.
Mr.
McDaniels’s first two marriages ended in divorce. Besides his wife, the
former Karen Thompson, he is survived by five sons, London McDaniels,
Christopher McDaniels, Django McDaniels, Mateo McDaniels and Dylan
Patterson; a daughter, Dali McDaniels; a sister, Patricia Nichols; and
nine grandchildren.
Although
Mr. McDaniels was absent from the charts as a performer after the early
1960s, his writing continued to leave its mark. His songs “have
substantial melodies and rich, useful harmonies,” Don Heckman wrote in
The New York Times in 1970, adding that it was “difficult to think of
any other composer since Bob Dylan who has managed so well to find
musical expression for the swirling cultural currents that envelop us.”
A version of this article appears in print on August 2, 2011, on page B14 of the New York edition with the headline: Eugene McDaniels, Singer And Songwriter, Dies at 76.
Singer-songwriter Eugene McDaniels reinvented himself as a folk-soul outlaw
"If you listen to Outlaw, you listen to Headless Heroes,
everybody missed the point, well, not everybody, but a lot of people
missed the point. It’s humor; I was just having fun, it was fun."
Wax Poetics: You’ve said you dropped out of the music industry because of flesh peddlers?
Eugene McDaniels: Well,
anyone who’s been in this industry for any length of time understands
that it’s basic indentured servitude—this industry. It’s like any other
corporate industry. It is basically set up to exploit and to garner
profits. And it’s not about love of music. I would suspect that the
majority of these people don’t love music. I don’t mean musicians, I
mean the people who run our industry, which is usually lawyers and
accountants, or entrepreneurs who know how to wend their way into the
industry and function. For instance, when I was at Liberty Records, they
weren’t interested in any of my own material for me. Which is okay, I
mean, I can buy that. But I learned through time and paying attention,
that really was about that fact that they were owning the publishing.
So, it’s all about money. That’s what our industry has fomented through
the years; that’s what has happened.
I
mean, there was a time when—Tijuana Brass, they were people who were
into the music and the artists. It was wonderful. That was a golden era,
though brief. I mean, it’s horrible. Our industry has been
absolutely destroyed by these greedy people. I mean, look at it; it’s
falling apart. Everybody knows, and everybody knows why, but nobody’s
talking. We’re all supposed to sit by and suck our thumbs, while these
guys make a fortune, tear up our business, and leave. I mean, it sounds
like other things that are happening in the world. It’s not so
different than the other things that are going on. It’s the same old
crap, over and over and over again. And the American people have sat
still and let this stuff happen to them—us, all of us—and have not made a
move to do anything about it. It blows my mind.
Was it after spending a couple of years at Liberty that your frustrations reached fever pitch?
Well
no, actually, because I was speaking up, and speaking out, they wanted
me out of there. Too much information, they did not want to deal with
that. And I understand, I have no complaints. They were just doing what
the rest of the industry was doing; it’s no big deal. Just making money,
and exploiting and enslaving to some extent, artists, be they White,
Black, or indifferent, it doesn’t make any difference; the color
of money is green.
After you dropped out of recording in the ’60s, you played jazz clubs, doing standards and writing your own songs?
Yes,
to some extent, yes. But I was encouraged not to, because they
wanted me to sing whatever was happening in the top ten, because that
was easier for their audiences not to have to work at. They could just
check it out, and say, “Oh yeah, that’s a tune I heard on the radio,
sounds good.” Something that people are familiar with so they can sell
those drinks.
And this was primarily in New York?
New
York, all over the country. That was not an important time for me, I
mean, maybe it was really important in that it helped me grow, and grow
up. I’m not bitter, I’m not angry, I’m not anything but happy. And I’m
happy not because of the business, but because I’ve learned from the
business. That’s why I’m happy. I’ve met some great people in this
industry—some great musicians, some great writers, some
great performers, great singers. Great minds. A gentleman by the name
of Michael Melvoin, he was president of NARAS for a while. He was
my personal pianist for a while, we traveled around the world, and
made a lot of friends, made a little money, and had a lot of fun. And
he’s a Rhodes scholar. I mean, the guy’s brilliant. He’s a brilliant
mind. Our industry is full of amazing people, and I just happen to know
Michael. One of his daughters played guitar for Prince for a long time.
And you played with Miles Davis and Coltrane and Cannonball?
That
started back in ’59, ’60. I went to Hollywood from Nebraska, working my
way across the country with a group called the Pineywoods
Mississippi Singers. I got to California, I sat in, and people liked
what I did. I got a job in Hollywood at a place called the Cellar, with
Red Mitchell, the bass player, and Mel Lewis, the drummer, and Lorraine
Geller, the piano player, and her husband, Herb Geller, very famous alto
player; he was wonderful. And his wife, Lorraine, was one of the best
jazz players in the country, but she was a woman, so she didn’t get the
full recognition that she should have gotten. But I walked in, and I
asked them if I could sit in, and they said, “Yes.” And after I finished
they said, “Do you want a job?” And I said, “Yes,” and that was the
beginning.
They
were all jazzers, so I had this dual thing going on. I loved jazz, I’m
singing jazz, but commercial record companies were coming and talking to
me. I got picked up by a gentleman by the name of [Simon] Waronker, and
he owned Liberty Records. Well, he signed me; we did this album called In Times Like These,
ballads and beautiful things. Johnny Mann Singers and those people were
involved. The next year he got sick, he had an aneurysm or something
like that. I can’t remember exactly, I was a little young, and a little
uninformed about things like that, but nonetheless, I knew he was a
beautiful man. I knew that; he was a fabulous person.
But my
career changed because the bean counter at the company, his name was Al
Bennett, took over as president of the company, and hired a guy out of
the mailroom. [I chuckle] No, hear me, a guy out of the mailroom produced me.
So, it turns out the guy’s name is Snuff Garrett, famous guy now, very
famous guy. And now that I’m a grown up, I can give him his kudos,
because he really knew what he was doing, about what he was doing. I
mean, he didn’t know what I was doing, but he knew what he was
doing, and I give him that. I give him credit for that. He had suggested
that I had thrown “A Hundred Pounds of Clay” away, and they put it out,
and in three weeks it was number one. So he misunderstood me, and I
misunderstood him. I owe him a debt of gratitude and thanks, because
he’s just a human being who was born in the South, and raised in
Lubbock, Texas; and his racist attitudes, and fears, and superior
beliefs were just an outgrowth of his environment. I would venture to
say that he’s not that kind of person now, because he’s learned. Look,
knowledge, hopefully, matures us. Living, hopefully, brings knowledge. I
hold no grudges or bad feelings against him, I have just reams of
thanks for the hits that he got me, and that’s how I feel about it.
You’ve spoken in the past about having been rejected for not being “soulful” enough.
The
thing is that you like what you like. Some people do everything they do
for acceptance, and then other people just live by their beliefs and
what makes them feel good. That latter belongs to me. I was just doing
what I like to do. Look, you go to France and they force you to learn
French. You can’t live in France and not know French. They
don’t categorize you by race, they categorize you by nationality.
If you speak French, and you live there, and you’ve got a French
passport, you are a Frenchman. People can say whatever they want about
the French, but I say they are a great people. A little odd compared to
us, but we’re really odd compared to other people in the world. Having
said that, I am a dyed-in-the-wool patriot. Because I believe in the
Constitution, I believe that all people are created equal, in the sense
that they have an opportunity to develop their possibilities. That’s
been the hallmark of this country. Look, poor Black guy, born to a
minister, who is a wonderful man with a deep heart, an abiding faith in
God. My high school teachers told me to get a trade, and I said, “Well, I
think I’m going to stick with the music.” And I’ve made millions of
dollars with this music. Not for me necessarily, but somebody. It just
goes to show that people who talk against show business, they’re talking
about something they don’t know anything about. If they knew, that
would be another thing.
A guy grabs a rock, he looks at the rock,
he plays with it, he moves it around, and he says, “I got it, Pet Rock!”
and got rich. This is the greatest country in the world. You can take a
fucking rock, and get rich. This is the greatest country in the world,
bar none. But we gotta learn how to vote properly; we’re voting for the
wrong people, man. Just because somebody’s got a little money and shit,
that’s no reason for us to be voting for them. We need somebody who’s a
patriot, who cares about the country. I venture to say that ain’t what’s
happening right now. The way it reads to me, these guys care about
corporate coffers so they can make money. That’s all I hear, that’s all
I’m seeing; I’m not seeing anything other than that.
It’s still common for record companies to exploit the “street” in artists.
Absolutely!
Here we have it; we have Black people calling their own women
“bitches,” when their mothers, and their sisters, and the women they
love are women. I could never do a song where I’m calling a group of
women “bitches.” I could never do it, because my mom is a woman, my
sister is a woman, my daughter is a woman. My honey, the woman that I
live with and swear by, she’s a woman. It’s like devaluing myself.
If the woman that bore me, and gave me life, put her life on the line so
that I’d be born, if I can call her a “bitch,” I’m really fucked up.
I
can’t tell other people how to make money, how to think, what they
believe in. I can’t believe for a second that any of these people
who are calling Black women “hoes” and “bitches” believes it for a
second. I don’t think they believe it for a second; they’re just making
money. As far as I’m concerned, it has to be that way. I mean, somebody
has to love somebody. Everybody can’t be completely detached from the
fact that they were born, and they were nurtured, and somebody fed them,
and helped them to get to school, and buy clothes and stuff. Everybody
that’s a rapper is not a street urchin, who raised themselves in the
street. I don’t believe it for a second, I do not believe that. I
believe that it is just a ploy to make money. And fine. If they’re doing
it just to make money, and they’re going home and apologizing to their
mothers, and their sisters, and their girlfriends, and their daughters,
then I can see that that’s okay. They’re beating the system, and I can
get with that.
Could you talk a bit about your friend Les McCann?
Les
McCann gave me my start as a writer. We worked together for two years
in Hollywood at the Cellar. There were people around the block trying to
get in there. We had such luminaries as Marlon Brando, Ozzie and
Harriet, and their families, Ricky Nelson. It was unbelievable,
stars and chauffeured cars. And we were making fifty dollars a week,
apiece. It was just further exploitation. We went to the guy, asked the
guy for a fifteen-dollar-a-week raise for the two of us, and he fired
us. And went out of business. Talk about stupidity, my God, how dumb can
you be. Sixty-five bucks a week? How about sixty-five bucks a night
just to get started.
How was Outlaw received when it was released in 1971?
First of all, Rolling Stone ran a cover story—“Outlaw or Thief?”—suggesting that I didn’t write my own songs.
What were the grounds?
The
grounds were racism—that was the grounds. It’s real simple. They’re not
going to give somebody who’s hitting the nail on the head that’s Black;
back in those days, they weren’t about to give credit. If it’s somebody
like Robert Zimmerman [Bob Dylan], then they’ll give him the credit. And I love
Miles Davis. So you can hear me going back and forth, and sometimes
mixing the two, because these guys are very, very special to me. But
that doesn’t eliminate the fact that I couldn’t be accepted just for
what I did; they had to look for a flaw so that they wouldn’t have
to hang with me, and let it be okay. I wasn’t doing the “bitches” and
“hoes” thing. I understand the language; I know how to use the language.
I
went to a party in New York City, and I’m cruising the party, and a guy
walks up to me and he says, “Ahh, excuse me? You don’t know that you’re
Black, do you?” Just like that. I said, “Are you out of your mind? What
the hell is wrong with you people?” Boy, there are some sick puppies
out there in this world. What am I supposed to do, fill some stereotype
for somebody’s need?
The screaming face on the cover suggests that this will be some kind of crazy
music, cranked up with anger against the Man. Eugene McDaniels-- "The Left Rev.
Mc D"-- has religion in his soul, and you know how wild those guys get. Just dig
the Book of Revelations references in "The Lord Is Back": "The lord is mad/ His
disposition's mean/ He's travelin' the road of mass destruction." And this is
from 1971, so you can bet that racists, hawks and Richard Nixon are at the top of
His shit list.
Any thought that this album is a novelty relic wears off, though, when you realize
how sincere and frequently great it is. Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse
has been a lost vinyl classic since it came out thirty years ago, and this reissue
has been trickling into record stores since sometime last year. The record is an
eclectic mix of soul, funk, and even folk, with a crack jazz band backing McDaniels--
a jazz singer himself in the 60s, and a hit songwriter and producer in the 70s.
It's attracted less attention and support than the reissue of Shuggie Otis'
Inspiration Information, but it has its own legend: allegedly, it went out
of print because Spiro Agnew himself called Atlantic Records to complain about the
content, and Atlantic stopped promoting the album.
This is hard to believe-- Agnew should have had bigger problems than bullying
artists, but more importantly, McDaniels' lyrics actually sound more concerned
than angry. He rages against injustice but he's more interested in hope: even
as God prepares for Judgment Day, McDaniels reminds us, "His smile is warm and
soothing/ As the morning light." Rather than targeting anyone to hate, McDaniels
tries to protect us and warn us, as on the title track: he pleads with warring
sides-- "Jews and the Arabs," "Left wing and right wing," "Niggahs and crackers"--
to get them to see that they're pawns: "We are the cannon fodder." The earnest
cry of the chorus, "Better get it together and see what's happening," emerges from
a real love. On the gorgeous ballad "Freedom Death Dance" he chides us for looking
away: "Everyone wants piece of mind/ Everybody says we should ignore/ The graves
we dance upon." McDaniels' smooth tenor, while technically not one of the best,
is direct and empathetic-- he's a preacher, a favorite uncle and the off-the-wall
guy sitting next to you at the bar.
Which is why McDaniels comes across not as an extremist or as some kind of
character, but as a pretty reasonable guy. He sings about war, but he also sings
an acoustic folk song, "Susan Jane," about getting it on with a rich, crazy hippie
girl; and there's "Supermarket Blues," which recounts how he got in a racially
motivated fight over a can of peas. The late-60s/early-70s era also informs
"Lovin' Man," a song about an extremely mortal Jesus-- a "sensuality seeker" whose
message of spiritual and physical love could get him in trouble with "the pigs."
Yet the album doesn't really sound dated until the last track, "The Parasite (for
Buffy)" (Sainte-Marie?), a ten-minute tribute to the Native Americans that ends
abruptly in a freak-out: McDaniels starts to scream with horror at their plight
and the band jumps to frantic noise. The clamor may be abrupt to modern ears,
but as always, his heart is in it.
As great as the lyrics are, Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse's resurgence
can be credited to the terrific music. The album has been prized and sampled by
the hip-hop community for years: that "get it together" line should be familiar to
most of you (from the Beastie Boys' Ill Communication, if nothing else) and
"Freedom Death Dance" shows up on the first A Tribe Called Quest album. McDaniels
taps some great musicians: the rhythm section includes Gary King (Idris Muhammad,
George Benson) on electric bass, plus Weather Report members Miroslav Vitous on
upright and Alphonse Mouzon on drums. Mouzon particularly stands out, with crisp
drumwork that's seamlessly integrated but breaks out all over the place. The band
can play it smooth on the slower "Jagger the Dagger" or "Freedom Death Dance," or
lift "Headless Heroes" on Richie Resnikoff's guitar and Harry Dhitaker's electric
piano.
The album sounds so ebullient, you almost forget that McDaniels' message of love
comes wrapped around the evils of racism, ethnic conflict and the bomb-- and it's
that shout at the end of "The Parasite" that knocks you awake again, and summons
up that wrath he was warning about earlier. All the problems McDaniels sings
about are still going on, and what was that about Judgment Day coming soon?
Is Spiro Agnew dead yet? Maybe it's not too late to save him.
Eugene McDaniels' story is a sadly familiar one. This
65-year-old singer, songwriter and producer is yet another musician
ripped off by his record company, another artist with a tremendous
amount of talent who never received props, another innovator whose music
became the backbone of several rap songs although he was never
acknowledged or given any money for the sampling of his music. But
McDaniels, unlike many others in this situation, is getting a second
chance. Thirty years after its original release, his long-out-of-print
album Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse is being reissued by
Label M Records, giving another generation an opportunity to absorb his
earthy combination of hi-fi soul, psychedelic funk and insightful social
commentary.
In 1971, McDaniels' provocative poetry and race-conscious lyrics
upset the establishment. McDaniels, who was born in Kansas City, Kansas,
says Richard Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, called Atlantic
Records and demanded to know why the label would release such a
politically charged and subversive album.
"I got a call from one of the Ertegun brothers who ran Atlantic, and
he was like, 'What the hell is going on? What are you trying to do?'"
McDaniels recalls. "Soon after [the record company] got the call, the
promotion on the record stopped, and it died."
The same year Headless Heroes proved too hot for Atlantic to handle, Motown released Marvin Gaye's masterpiece What's Going On?
Both artists used brutally honest language and a journalistic eye for
detail to document America's treatment of African-Americans, but the
records experienced very different fates. What's Going On? is universally hailed as one of the greatest albums of all time, while Headless Heroes vanished into obscurity.
"It was a black man in open, conscious resistance of the power that
was trying to keep him enslaved — that was me. I was just teasing the
powers that be," McDaniels says, laughing. "It was great and horrible at
the same time. At last I got a chance to say what I believed in my
deepest heart about politics, slavery and about the genocide of the
Indians." (McDaniels is part Native American.) "Music was the only forum
I had to express myself. Who is going to listen to me talk on the
street corner?"
Musically, Headless Heroes unveils a seamless tapestry of
pure soul, but McDaniels' work was inspired by a folk singer and a jazz
musician. "Bob Dylan was always serious," he says. "When he first came
out, I didn't like him because I was consciously into music at a
specific level. But my unconscious said to me, 'Wait a minute, just
listen.' I couldn't stand his voice because I had rules about how a
voice should sound, but I told myself to give up the rules, man, and let
stuff happen. I found out this guy is really talking about some
important stuff. When I started recording Headless Heroes, I was
thinking in terms of Miles Davis and Bob Dylan along with my own
interpretations of that, so that's why the album came out the way it
did."
While most mainstream music listeners might not have experienced
McDaniels' work as a primary source, even casual hip-hop fans have
probably heard some of his grooves. DJs and producers have been pirating
breaks from Headless Heroes for years, with the Beastie Boys, A
Tribe Called Quest, Organized Konfusion and Pete Rock ranking among the
most high-profile raiders. Atlantic, the label that buried the album,
now collects all the royalties from such samples, and McDaniels doesn't
see a dime.
"We are in a slavery business," he says. "The major record companies
are slave owners. Artists have next to no rights to their own
material."
But after years of having no claim to his soul classic, McDaniels
finally has the opportunity to cash in on its delayed popularity. Headless Heroes
ranks near the top of crate-diggers' wish lists, going for up to $100
at used-record stores and spawning thousands of bootleg copies. With
hardcore soul addicts finally getting the chance to purchase the
original album for a reasonable price, Headless Heroes figures to be a successful reissue, but McDaniels says he has no particular expectations. "If
people are listening at a deeper level than just listening for money,
good," he says. "I don't want people sayin', 'Is this dude going to make
some money? Is his record going to be platinum?' Believe me, I have
made money. I have had money stolen from me. It doesn't matter. None of
that matters. My life is so beautiful. God sends money to me because I
have tapped in so hard to his power."
McDaniels' spirituality can be traced back to the relationship he
had with his father, a Church of God and Christ minister who died in
1991. "My dad came from a sharecropper family," McDaniels says. "He was
self-educated and put himself through high school after he became a
minister. He didn't believe in poverty — he didn't believe in the
concept — so he always found a way for us to live well. He was an
amazing guy."
His father also introduced him to music, in the form of hymns and
gospel. "My dad says that from the time I was two I was singing," he
says. "Music is not something I chose; it chose me."
At age eleven, McDaniels formed his own R&B group, The Sultans
(later the Echoes of Joy). "Being with my guys was a lot of fun, but I
was at a point in my life where I had to figure out what I was going to
do," he says.
As a solo artist, he scored several regional hits in the early '60s,
but singing jazz became his calling. He did Sarah Vaughan impressions
at a nightclub to make ends meet. ("She was my heart," he says. "I
wanted to sing like her so much.") McDaniels worked with Cannonball
Adderley, Miles Davis, the Count Basie Band and numerous other jazz
players. He later would be best known for writing "Compared to What" for
Eddie Harris and Les McCann and Roberta Flack's hit "Feel Like Makin'
Love."
Now living in Pittery Point, Maine, in a sort of self-imposed exile,
McDaniels still writes, but he's concentrating on screenplays instead
of music. He would like to record again, but he can't land a deal. "The
industry loves young, dumb kids," he says. "There's nothing wrong with
that. I was a young, dumb kid. When I was young and dumb they exploited
me and stole millions of dollars from me. That's the way the industry
works."
It
isn’t a secret: Gene McDaniels, an unthreatening song stylist who
scored several hits just before Beatlemania struck, and Eugene
McDaniels, a Black Power militant who released two radicalized funk-soul
albums in the early ‘70s, are one and the same. It may well be that
I’m the only living critic who didn’t already know this, but it still
feels like a minor revelation, as it might be to any listener who’s
appreciated “both” artists’ work for years, though for entirely
distinct, even incompatible, reasons. And even those in know might
still wonder how McDaniels moved from Bacharach and David’s “Another
Tear Falls” in 1962 to, say, 1971’s “Freedom Death Dance,” and what he
was doing in between.
As for myself, I didn’t do the forty
seconds of Googling required to confirm the connection until I stumbled
on McDaniels’s “Gene”-era performance in The Young Swingers, a
1963 quasi-musical you could categorize as “teen exploitation” if that
didn’t make it sound more exciting than it is. Shot and acted at a
level below that of an average Perry Mason episode, the movie
concerns some nice kids who just want to run their sketchy
coffeehouse-with-entertainment but run afoul of a Heartless Developer
intent on buying up the block. (Faulty wiring is a major plot point.)
The principals – Rod Lauren? Molly Dee? – are justifiably obscure; the
musical numbers run to blank-eyed renditions of the folk chestnut
“Greenback Dollar.”
Though the movie isn’t overtly racist in
the manner of many ‘40s and ‘50s musicals, in which black performers and
white audiences never appeared in the same shot, McDaniel’s supporting
role as Fred Lewis, a law student who spends most of his screen time
hitting the books in a back office, practically defines “tokenism.”
Inevitably, this NAACP poster-child at one point trades his V-neck for a
natty suit to deliver “Mad, Mad, Mad,” an ersatz jump-blues, from the
club’s postage-stamp stage. Though McDaniels in no way embarrasses
himself in the role, it’s clearly a way station on the downgrade of his
career’s first phase.
Born
in 1935, the Nebraska-bred former gospel singer was marketed by
mid-sized Liberty Records as a smooth black crooner in the Johnny Mathis
mold, but his biggest successes were uptempo pop-R&B singles like
the #3 “A Hundred Pounds of Clay,” built around an odd God-created-woman
theme, and “Tower of Strength,” with a slide trombone hook and lopside
phrase-lengths that mark it as an early Bacharach production. By 1963,
though, the hits were drying up, and McDaniel’s turn in The Young Swingers was a step down from his earlier appearance in the Richard Lester-directed It’s Trad, Dad (known as Ring-a-Ding Rhythm in the U.S.).
Fast forward to 1970: The grainy, guerilla-styled cover shoot for the Outlaw
LP finds a Bible-toting, denim-clad McDaniels flanked by then-wife
Ramona, outfitted in ammo-belt and Angela Davis ‘fro, and a grim-faced
white woman (one Susan James) with a semi-automatic. Its follow-up, Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse
superimposes McDaniels’ screaming face on a painting of a samurai
battle scene. Both credit the singer as “Eugene McDaniels,” his birth
name, and as “The Left Rev. McD,” and if there’s any confusion about
what he’s preaching, it’s put to rest by his epigraph to Outlaw:
“Under conditions of national emergency, like now, there are only two
kinds of people – those who work for freedom and those who do not.
The packaging smacks of radical chic, and some of the content shares its counter-cultural date-stamp. The title track of Outlaw,
co-written by cover star James, celebrates a free-lovin’ hippie chick:
“She’s an outlaw, she don’t wear a bra….She cannot dig machismo, but she
really can dig some masculinity.” Even here, though, there are more
thoughtful moments: the loose 12-bar structure and the line “She thinks
justice is fair, that’s why she’s living with nature and not the law”
evokes Dylan’s “She Belongs to Me” (“the law can’t touch her at all”)
and the distinction between law and actual justice recurs across both
albums, especially on “The Parasite,” a nine-minute narrative of the
first meeting between Europeans and Native Americans. (You can guess
which group the title refers to.) Elsewhere, McDaniels’ attacks his
themes of poverty, exclusion, and the meaning of freedom from varied
angles, from urban reportage (“Welfare City,” “Supermarket Blues”) to spiritually-tinged allegory (“Headless Heroes,” “Sagittarius Red”).
Musically, much of Outlaws countrified blues, casually arranged, while Heroes
is tougher, tighter, and more adventurous. With a distinctive two-bass
underpinning supplied by prog hero Miroslav Vitous and Miles Davis alum
Ron Carter, it’s largely the work of seasoned jazzmen essaying funk,
and its no surprise that Ray Lucas’s drum breaks have resurfaced on
records by A Tribe Called Quest and the Beastie Boys. McDaniel’s own
roots in older, more mannered vocal styles can be detected in the
mock-balladeering of “Love Letter to America” and the twisted, scat-like
lines of “Cherrystones,” but on “Unspoken Dreams of Light,” he yells
himself raw, pressing past any conventional notion of soul or jazz
“chops.”
Richard Nixon 1969 “Great Silent Majority” Speech:
The albums’ home run may be Heroes’s
“Silent Majority,” a sardonic unmasking of ideology behind the
Nixon-era code-word for “real” America. “Silent majority/gathering
around the hanging tree…stuffing their faces with pastry…not so silent
far as I can see.” (Tea Partiers: Rev McD had your number.) The
monotonous rhymes may not be the subtlest songwriting technique, but
these weren’t subtle times, and the song makes its point as forcefully
as the best work of contemporaries Gil-Scott Heron or The Last Poets.
According to Patrick Thomas’s liner notes to a 2003 reissue of Outlaw,
this is also the song that led figures in the Nixon administration –
possibly even Spiro Angew – to pressure Atlantic to drop McDaniels.
Which they did, though weak sales were a
factor as well. This helps explain his relative silence since the early
‘70s – independent releases in 1975 and 2005 have eluded me – but not
where McDaniels was at between his most productive recording years with
Liberty and Atlantic. Again, some of the answer is in the public
record: Post-1963, McDaniels reinvented himself as a non-performing
songwriter, penning the cynical “Compared to What” for Les McCann and
Eddie Harris and the much-covered soft-soul ballad “Feel Like Making
Love” (not to be confused with Bad Company’s) for Robert Flack, who also
covered Outlaw’s “Reverend Lee.”
These credits give us some of the what and where, but not the why and how. It’s tempting to imagine The Young Swingers’s
affable Fred Lewis passing the bar, joining and defending civil rights
marchers in Selma and Birmingham, becoming disillusioned with “the law,”
and dispensing underground justice as “the Left Reverend” in the
post-Malcolm X era of the Black Panthers. Tempting, but utterly
fanciful: The real McDaniels was in the music business all the time, and
what happened to his writing and singing between 1963 and 1970 is no
more and no less than what happened to the country.
EUGENE McDANIELS (1935-2011)
Artist Biography
by Bruce Eder
Gene McDaniels
was one of the more popular artists to emerge from the 1950s R&B
scene just as "soul" began to establish itself as a distinct subcategory
(and later the dominant sound) of the latter genre. Born Eugene Booker McDaniels
in Kansas City, Kansas in 1935, and later raised in Omaha, Nebraska, he
was the son of a minister, and gospel music, along with the words of
the bible, filled his life early on -- his early idols included the Soul Stirrers and the Swan Silvertones. Before his teens, he also discovered jazz just as bebop was sweeping the latter field, and he became an early admirer of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis; McDaniels
always gravitated toward singing, not surprising given his four-octave
range, but he also became proficient on the saxophone and the trumpet.
His first performing group, the Echoes of Joy (later
the Sultans) -- organized when he was 11 -- specialized exclusively in
gospel music, but McDaniels
later started to work popular tunes into their repertoire. Following a
citywide singing competition in which he managed to distinguish himself
amid the best of all of his peers, he started looking toward music as a
career. He later forsook traditional academics in favor of study at the
Omaha Conservatory of Music, and made his professional debut as a member
of the Mississippi Piney Woods Singers, whose touring got him to the
West Coast, where he began performing jazz as a solo singer in his spare
time. Eventually he began singing with his idol, Les McCann, at a club called The Lamp, which didn't last long but built McDaniels a following sufficient to get him noticed by Liberty Records.
After being signed by Sy Waronker, McDaniels was first put into the hands of producer Felix Slatkin, but their first two singles and an accompanying album failed to sell in serious quantities. His break came when Snuff Garrett took over as producer -- Slatkin was a phenomenal musician, as a violinist and conductor, but Garrett had an ear for sound and songs that was second to none, and was responsible for corraling the song that became McDaniels'
first hit, "A Hundred Pounds of Clay." The singer himself hated the
song, believing it too simplistic in the wake of the jazz he'd been
singing for the previous decade, but Garrett's
instincts proved correct, the single reaching number three in the
spring of 1961 and earning a gold record award. His next record, "A
Tear," was a minor chart hit. But the record after that, "Tower of
Strength," co-written by Burt Bacharach, reached number five and earned McDaniels another gold record award in the process.
McDaniels
saw regular chart action over the next three years, and even made it
into one classic jukebox movie, It's Trad, Dad (1962) (directed by Richard Lester),
where he was seen performing "Another Tear Falls." His brand of soul
music gradually faded from popularity, however, in the face of
competition from figures such as Otis Redding and Sam & Dave,
with their more raw, less pop-oriented sound. He left Liberty in 1965
and passed through Columbia and a small group of other labels. And
following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
in 1968, he departed the United States. For the next three years, he
lived in Denmark and Sweden and spent his time writing. When he returned
to America in 1971, it was as "Eugene McDaniels"
that he resumed recording, on Atlantic. After that time, he
concentrated on songwriting and publishing, scoring successes in both
departments: his song "Compared to What?" was recorded by McCann and also by Roberta Flack,
for whom he then wrote "Reverend Lee" and the immensely successful
"Feel Like Makin’ Love," which reached number one on the Billboard, Cash
Box, and Record World charts in 1974. He also produced numerous other
artists, including Jimmy Smith, Merry Clayton, and Nancy Wilson. Gene McDaniels died in his sleep at home in Maine on July 29, 2011.
Gene McDaniels, the American singer and songwriter, who has died aged
76, began and ended his career as the smoothest of vocal stylists. His
hits of the early 1960s, such as A Hundred Pounds of Clay and Tower of
Strength, cast him as a suave performer of upbeat pop songs aimed at
white teenagers; in his last years he would occasionally take the stage
to deliver standards with all the graceful inventiveness of the great
jazz singer he might have been.
In between came the event that changed his life, when his protest
song Compared to What became an unexpected hit after being released on
an album recorded at the 1969 Montreux jazz festival by his first
employer, the pianist Les McCann, and the saxophonist Eddie Harris. The
song went on to be covered more than 270 times by other artists,
including Ray Charles, Della Reese and John Legend. Its success enabled
McDaniels to stop performing in night-clubs, an environment he detested
because of the lack of respect he felt was shown towards the music by
their audiences.
The
series of albums he made after the royalties from Compared to What
started flowing in, joined in 1974 by those from Feel Like Makin' Love,
which he wrote for Roberta Flack, failed to earn further chart success
but attracted a small cult following which grew as the artists of the
hip-hop generation discovered them and recycled their distinctive
grooves in the form of samples. He was delighted by the attention from
musicians 30 and 40 years his junior. "It's a great source of pride," he
said. "I'm glad to be a part of the hip-hop movement – however
remotely, however intimately."
The son of a minister, McDaniels was born in Kansas City, Kansas. The
family moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where he sang in gospel groups before
studying at Omaha University's music conservatory. At 19 he took his
four-octave voice and his good looks to Los Angeles, where he sang in
clubs and eventually joined the group led by McCann, who was never the
most cerebral of jazz pianists but knew how to use the devices of gospel
music to get a room rocking. The pair fell out in the early 60s, by
which time McDaniels had signed a contract with Liberty Records and
begun his string of chart hits with songs provided by the younger
generation of Tin Pan Alley composers, including Burt Bacharach and Bob
Hilliard (Tower of Strength), Gerry Goffin and Carole King (Point of No
Return), Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman (Spanish Lace) and Randy Newman
(Somebody's Waiting). Produced by Snuff Garrett, Liberty's head of
A&R, these recordings stayed on the pop side of soul music, with
McDaniels's delivery already sounding somewhat formal by the rapidly
changing standards of the time.
In
the UK, his career was hindered when British music publishers diverted
his hit songs to local artists; Craig Douglas and Frankie Vaughan
recorded A Hundred Pounds of Clay and Tower of Strength respectively,
their popularity ensuring that the covers overshadowed the original
versions. Nevertheless McDaniels was invited to Britain to appear
alongside Douglas and Helen Shapiro in the 1961 film It's Trad, Dad,
whose director, Dick Lester, shot him wreathed in cigarette smoke
against a black background, like a Herman Leonard photograph, as he delivered the ballad Another Tear Falls, later to be recorded with greater success by the Walker Brothers.
Garrett also encouraged him to sing such mainstream ballads as And
the Angels Sing and Portrait of My Love, using sophisticated
arrangements by Marty Paich and Hank Levine in an attempt to turn him
into a younger version of Nat King Cole. But perhaps his best recording
of the 60s, although not the most successful at the time, was of a
powerful song called Walk With a Winner, for which he wrote the lyric.
Jack Nitzsche's driving arrangement and dense production helped make it
an enduring favourite with Britain's Northern Soul dancers.
At the end of the decade, Compared to What came out of the blue.
Inspired by the civil rights and Vietnam war protests, its
uncompromising lyric was first heard on Flack's debut album in 1969:
"The president, he's got his war/Folks don't know just what it's
for/Nobody gives us rhyme or reason/Have one doubt, they call it treason
…" Flack's version was accompanied by a delicately funky rhythm, but
when McCann and Harris performed it in Montreux they added muscle to the
groove so effectively that their nine-minute version quickly became a
favourite with dancers, sending Swiss Movement, the LP on which it was
featured, to the top of the jazz album charts.
Liberated
from financial worries, McDaniels revived his own recording career with
two albums, Outlaw (1970) and Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse (1971),
in which, now rechristened Eugene McDaniels, he presented a strong and
sometimes bitter social and political message set to stripped-down
street-funk and quasi-rock rhythms. The cover photograph of Outlaw
depicted a multiracial group of armed urban guerrillas, an explicit
statement that seemed to align him more closely with the rage of Amiri
Baraka and the Last Poets than with the gentler black protest music of
Marvin Gaye's What's Going On and Curtis Mayfield's Back to the World.
Their impact, however, was minimal until they were unearthed by
hip-hop's crate-digging obsessives, who put such tracks as Cherrystones
and Jagger the Dagger to new use. The album Natural Juices (1975) showed
a more romantic side, but there was no audience for such fine love
songs as Shell of a Man and Dream of You and Me. He moved into record
production, working with the organist Jimmy Smith (for whom he produced
the album Sit On It! in 1977) and the singers Nancy Wilson and Merry
Clayton.
His later years were spent by the ocean in Kittery Point, Maine. In 2010, he performed an acoustic version of A Hundred Pounds of Clay to a group of teenage girls attending an arts outreach programme, and in February this year delivered a delicately poised version of The Nearness of You, accompanied by piano and guitar, to an appreciate audience at the Portland Museum of Art, looking and sounding immaculate.
He is survived by his third wife, Karen, and six children.
•Eugene Booker McDaniels, singer, songwriter and record producer, born 12 February 1935; died 29 July 2011
Like many other Americans of the era, something happened to Eugene
McDaniels between 1965 and 1970 that transformed him from Gene McDaniels
to “Eugene McDaniels the Left Rev. Mc D”. The former Mr. McDaniels was a
clean-cut soul singer in the mold of Jackie Wilson that enjoyed minor
commercial success in the early ‘60s with songs like “A Hundred Pounds
of Clay” and “Tower of Strength”; the reinvented Reverend posited
himself as a fervent voice of protest, recording a pair of now-classic
records for Atlantic in 1970 and 1971. But where many other artists
dabbled in the counterculture to explore different ways of presenting
their image or to take advantage of looser codes of moral conduct,
McDaniels fully embraced the movement’s radical politics—so much so that
then-Vice President Spiro Agnew allegedly called Atlantic to issue a
verbal cease-and-desist order upon the release of his second record (Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse) for the label.
Although Headless Heroes was briefly available on CD as part
of Joel Dorn’s Label M reissue series (it’s out of print once again—if
you run across it anywhere, snap that sucker up), McDaniels’ first LP, Outlaw has gone without domestic reissue until now. Label M’s release of Headless Heroes
was quite revelatory, for its jazzy soul vibes had been a source of
significant hip-hop samples (Pete Rock, A Tribe Called Quest, Organized
Konfusion) whose original sources were only heard by a fortunate few
cratediggers. Outlaw, on the other hand, is an entirely different
breed of soul: more rock-influenced, more overtly political (if that’s
possible), and truly beyond comparison with any of its contemporaries.
As on Headless Heroes, McDaniels recorded Outlaw with a
rock- (and jazz-) solid band that featured legendary jazz bassist Ron
Carter and ubiquitous ‘70s session guitarist Hugh McCracken—a group that
fleshed out the Rev’s hippie-folk-funky dreams with undaunted
restraint. The band is largely responsible for the record’s pure
cohesiveness, as they bring McDaniels’s disparate styles together into
one of the most powerfully lasting statements of post-Aquarian Age
culture. Yet without the songs McDaniels brought to the table—a potent
balance of leftist politics and polyamorous escapades—it’d be a merely
entertaining record; as realized altogether, it’s an incredibly potent
diatribe that resonates as strongly today is it must have 33 years ago.
The politically motivated songs range from jaunty ditties tempered
with a bit of idealist humor (“Welfare City”) to righteously
melodramatic torch songs like “Love Letter to America”, the latter of
which finds McDaniels veering dangerously close to a Neil Diamond-esque
vocal delivery before the band bails him out with an astonishing
freefloated instrumental bridge. Elsewhere, McDaniels previews the more
jazz-inflected moodiness of Headless Heroes as he takes the Left
Rev. Mc D to his highest pulpit on the urgently preachy “Unspoken Dreams
of Light”. “Silent Majority”, however, is the record’s most scathing
tirade—with lines like “Silent majority / Is calling out loud to you and
me / From Arlington Cemetery / To stand up tall for humanity”, it’s no
wonder the government took an “unusual interest” in his musical
activities.
Yet McDaniels’ more playful songs on Outlaw are just as
brilliant, if not more so. “Reverend Lee” is an undeniably excellent bit
of country funk that tells the story of a tryst with Satan’s daughter,
ending in what might be termed a “pitchfork wedding”; keeping in mind
McDaniels’s adopted alias, one can’t help but wonder if there’s a bit of
truth to the story. The album’s opening cut, “Outlaw”, digs even deeper
into an edgy, countrified soul vibe to pay homage to the same
free-spirited, compassionate angel of the counterculture that Tom
Robbins fantasizes about in just about every one of his novels.
McDaniels’ delivery has the same come-down hangover blues of Let It Bleed-era
Mick Jagger, except where you could hear Jagger’s nervous undertones of
plotting escape, McDaniels feels more like “Let’s smoke a joint and do
it again.”
One of McDaniels’s last lines in “Outlaw” is “She’s her very own
person / Lovely, exciting, and raw”—I couldn’t think of a better way to
describe the Reverend himself. Especially taken along with Headless Heroes, Outlaw
shows McDaniels to be one of those artists you encounter only a few
times over the course of an entire life’s worth of music listening.
THE MUSIC OF EUGENE McDANIELS: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. McDANIELS:
Eugene Mc Daniels - 1970:
'Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse' & 'Outlaw'- [Full Albums, Reissue] HQ
Songwriter
Eugene McDaniels speaks about his hit song "Compared to What." Recorded
by Les McCann and Eddie Harris in 1969. Recently recorded in 2010 by
John Legend and The Roots, with 278 different recorded versions in
between. Imaged and edited by Dennis Collins Johnson and Grace Peirce.
Compared To What?--Les McCann and Eddie Harris
(Composition and lyrics by Eugene McDaniels):
The song was recorded in 1969 by pianist Les McCann and saxophonist
Eddie Harris for their album, Swiss Movement, recorded live at the
Montreux Jazz Festival.
COMPARED TO WHAT?
(Lyrics and music by Eugene McDaniels, 1969)
Love the lie and lie the love Hanging on with push and shove Possession is the motivation That is hangin' up the goddamn nation Looks like we always end up in a rut
Everybody now! Tryin' to make it real, compared to what?
Slaughter houses are killin' hogs Twisted children are killin' frogs Poor dumb rednecks rollin' logs Tired old ladies, kissin' dogs I hate the human love of that stinkin' mutt
I can't use it!
Tryin' to make it real, compared to what Come on baby, now
The President, he's got his war Folks don't know just what it's for Nobody gives us rhyme or reason Have one doubt, they call it treason We chicken feathers all without one gut
Goddammit! Tryin' to make it real, compared to what?
Church on Sunday, sleep and nod Trying to duck the wrath of God Preachers fillin' us with fright They all trying to teach us with what they think is right They really got to be some kind of stupid nut
I can't use it!
Tryin' to make it real, compared to what
Where's that bee and where's that honey Where's my god and where's my money Unreal values, crass distortion Unwed mothers need abortion Kinda brings to mind ol' young King Tut
(He did it now)
Tryin' to make it real, compared to what?
"Love Letter To America" by Eugene McDaniels--1970:
"Welfare City" by Eugene McDaniels--1970:
Eugene Mcdaniels - "Unspoken Dreams Of Light":
Eugene McDaniels - "The Parasite"
Gene McDaniels - "Tower Of Strength":
GENE McDANIELS -'100 LBS OF CLAY' -Full Album -1961:
Eugene Booker McDaniels (February 12, 1935[1] – July 29, 2011), who recorded as Gene McDaniels early in his career, was an African-American singer and songwriter. He had his greatest recording success in the early 1960s, and had continued success as a songwriter with songs including "Compared to What" and Roberta Flack's "Feel Like Makin' Love".
After recording two unsuccessful singles and an album, he was teamed with producer Snuff Garrett, with whom he recorded his first hit, "A Hundred Pounds of Clay", which reached number 3 in the Billboard Hot 100chart in early 1961 and sold over one million copies, earning gold disc status.[1] Its follow-up, "A Tear", was less successful but his third single with Garrett, "Tower of Strength", co-written by Burt Bacharach, reached number 5 and won McDaniels his second gold record.[2] "Tower of Strength" reached number 49 in the UK Singles Chart, losing out to Frankie Vaughan's chart-topping version.[4]
In 1962 he appeared performing in the movie It's Trad, Dad!, directed by Richard Lester. He continued to have minor hit records, including "Chip Chip",
"Point Of No Return" and "Spanish Lace", each in 1962, but his suave
style of singing gradually became less fashionable. In 1965 he moved to Columbia Records, with little success, and in 1968, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, he left the US to live in Denmark and Sweden, where he concentrated on songwriting. He returned to the US in 1971, and recorded thereafter as Eugene McDaniels.[2] In 1965 his "Point Of No Return" was covered by the British R&B band Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames on their EP Fame At Last.
In the early 1970s, McDaniels recorded on the Atlantic label, which released his albums Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse and Outlaw. According to one source: "Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse is a standard-bearer for psychedelic soul/funk/jazz rhythms and is borrowed frequently for its samples."[citation needed] In the 1980s, he recorded an album with the percussionist Terry Silverlight, which has not yet been released. In 2005, McDaniels released Screams & Whispers on his own record label. In 2009, it was announced that he was to release a new album, Evolution's Child,
which featured his lyrics, and a number of songs composed or arranged
with pianist Ted Brancato. Some of the songs featured jazz musician Ron Carter on concert bass and Terri Lyne Carrington on drums. McDaniel's "Jagger the Dagger" was featured on the Tribe Vibesbreakbeat compilation album, after it had been sampled by A Tribe Called Quest.
McDaniels also appeared in films. They included It's Trad, Dad! (1962, released in the United States as Ring-A-Ding Rhythm), which was directed by Richard Lester. McDaniels also appeared in The Young Swingers (1963). He is briefly seen singing in the choir in the 1974 film Uptown Saturday Night. He was the original voice actor for "Nasus", a champion in the computer game League of Legends.[5] McDaniels lived as a self-described "hermit" in the state of Maine. In 2010 he launched a series of YouTube
videos on his website, featuring his music and thoughts on some of his
creations. McDaniels died peacefully on July 29, 2011, at his home.[6]
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
Eugene McDaniels in 1994
Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse by Eugene McDaniels (1971)--Atlantic Records
