Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night-When Motown Mowed Them Down

Click on the headline to link to a YouTubefilm clip of Percy Sledge performing the classic R&B song, When A Man Loves A Woman.

CD Review

Classic Rock: 1966, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1987

1966, ah, beautiful lost, lost in a haze of bad booze and drugs, 1966. All kinds of music was busting out in the post-Beatles, post vanilla music (Bobby Vee, Bobby Vinton , etc. pretty boy early 1960s music), and post Rolling Stones reverend R&B night. Just a hint of psychedelic, just a hint of new frame rock with that frenetic guitar replacing the piano or drums at the center of the action, maybe putting the sexy saxes in back for while (although to now ears less than one thought), and just a hint of a coming storming out of Motown (records and the city) that a new sound was aborning’. And if I was pressed, hard pressed, no holds barred, no on the one hand and then on the other, straight, up pressed that is the year I would say black-centered music found its national (and maybe world-wide), its big time crossover niche in the vast sea of cultural gradient musical sounds that make up this immigrant-tinged country.

No, not the old timey country blues stuff that we craved early in the decade during our love affair folk minute when the world and that the likes of primordial Son House, Skip James, Betsy Smith, Ida Smith (and a bagful of female barrelhouse singers named Smith) 1920s, down the Delta, up from hunger, no electricity make due juke joint Saturday night, hard sweat week at the plantation, whiskey, women and cut blades stuff. Nor that post-World War II mad monk Muddy Waters –Howlin’ Wolf all juiced up and city pretty electric blues Saturday night after hard killing floor factory work week, whiskey, women, and cut blades urban hell-hole glut stuff. And certainly not the 1950s Allen Ginsberg Howl negro streets (before Malcolm came and made black, black hear me, self-respecting and massive hell-raising for justice on those mean black streets the order of the day) be-bop doo-wop rock (jazz too) that exposed (not hipped, just exposed) white kids like me to the heaven sent sound of black-originated music.

Then came an explosion, no self-pitying from hunger stuff, no do lang, do lang, do do do, la,la, la stuff, no back porch, segregated back porch, studio but professional music professionally done. Baby, baby, baby, and oh, yes, oh yes, music that made one think of yes, sex, and other stuff not in a salacious way (well, maybe a little) but as just ordinary okay human existence, warts and all. And no sound put that whole schema together in 1966 better than Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Women. At the end of the night, the dance club, bad booze night you could grab your gal, or grab a gal, and slow dance to some Mason-Dixon and the Line cover, big sexy alto sax playing, soft drums, a little organ, flashes of Gabriel’s trumpet for effect, until the lights came on. And maybe, if the booze didn’t floor you by then, you might just get lucky. Yah, that one was that kind of a song. Kind of put innocent what is life about, what is sex all about, what are girls all about songs (great 1950s songs, don’t get me wrong) like the Chiffons He’s So Fine and The Falcon’s You’re Fine in the shades.