Ba-psssshhh! Dis generay-SHUN, brrrrap! ruuules the nay-TION, brrrrrap! with VER-shun!!
Whether you’d been grooving to reggae since its’ inception or had never heard a song by a Jamaican act before, there was no doubt that Pass The Dutchie got asses wiggling and backs off walls as soon as it came on a sound system. A remake of a song called Pass The Kutchie, the title was changed because of the fact that the members of Musical Youth were all in their early-mid teens (for the uninformed, a “kutchie” refers to a joint. A “dutchie” is a pot that food gets cooked in. Pot? Pot!! Oh, those crazy Jamaicans).
The members of Musical Youth, who were British of Jamaican descent, brought reggae to the Top 10 on the pop charts for one of the first times, presaging acts ranging from Shaggy to Shabba Ranks to Sean Paul. The reason this song sticks out from so much other music released around this period is that it sounds like everyone involved in the recording is having a blast. Must have been one good kutchie being passed around!
Watch the video. I dare you not to dance or at least bob your head (because you might be reading this at work and if you start dancing, your co-workers might worry a little bit). I can even help you out with a translation of some of the Jamaican patois. Just don’t ask me why the kid croaks “ribbit!” at the end of the song.
I was a teenage fanatic for the band Chicago in the late 80s, just as they were reaching the end of their second commercial heyday – a near-decade-long reign on the charts fueled by David Foster (and David Foster surrogate) produced power ballads – and were on the cusp of becoming crusty fixtures of summertime state fairs. The first three concerts I attended were all Chicago concerts (though, tellingly, the last of those concerts found them co-headlining with the Beach Boys – the reigning kings of the oldies circuit), and somewhere between the release of Chicago 18 in 1986 and Chicago 19 two years later, I’d acquired on either cassette or CD (or in some cases, both) every single Chicago album released since the band’s 1969 debut Chicago Transit Authority, on which they presented themselves as an idealistic jazzy-art-prog-rock band with horns and a social conscience that ran counter to the distasteful Nixon connections of Blood, Sweat & Tears, their chief competitors in the idealistic jazzy-art-prog-rock sweepstakes.
While my junior high and high school peers were busy carefully carving Metallica and Megadeth logos into their study hall desks, I would proudly sport my Chicago “Victorious Tour 1989” t-shirt; and where the unwashed masses on my school sang the praises of Jimi Hendrix, I defiantly extolled the virtues of Terry Kath whose distinctively rhythmic wah-wah-isms (best exemplified by the extended solo on the group’s iconic 1971 single “25 or 6 to 4”) were much admired by The Hendrix himself. It may not have been the most socially advantageous band to fall in love with – by that time, Chicago was an unabashedly corporate entity headed up by a cabal of wealthy, middle-aged ex-hippies. Nevertheless Chicago 19 proved to be arguably the best, and certainly the most successful album of their second act, earning multiple platinum certifications and yielding no fewer than five hit singles including “Look Away” which Billboard magazine eventually anointed the #1 single of 1989.
It’s a far cry from where the band had been ten years earlier when they released Chicago 13. This was a band adrift both artistically and commercially – a band still reeling from the sudden, tragic loss of their visionary singer and guitarist Terry Kath (who’d accidentally shot and killed himself at a party in 1978), and struggling with some newfound autonomy following the firing of their longtime manager-producer-svengali James William Guercio.
Heralded by the nine minute disco opus “Street Player”, the band’s last truly horn-driven single which, despite the band’s appearance on an SNL episode, didn’t really do much chart-wise, but gained notoriety in the 90s when it was liberally sampled by the Bucketheads for their club hit “The Bomb”, Chicago 13 – “The Highrise Album” – was the second in a trio of transitional, wildly unfocused, and mostly hitless late 70s albums which found the group experimenting with, among other things, actual album titles (the band’s 12th album was called Hot Streets), and ill-advised (and, indeed, sort of racially insensitive) studio gimmickry like P.C. Moblee, a manipulation of Peter Cetera’s otherwise clenched-cheeks, clenched-jaw white-boy whine made to sound like a wax-museum version of a vintage Chess Records bluesman.
Also unique to these “lost years” for the band was the voice of singer-guitarist Donnie Dacus who’d been recruited to replace Kath despite having virtually nothing in common with Kath stylistically. As a singer, Kath’s soulful howl was often compared to Ray Charles (best exemplified on Chicago’s neglected 1975 single “Brand New Love Affair”), his guitar playing was funkified and percussive with an innate sense for scale and detail. Donnie Dacus, on the other hand, was merely a serviceable, unsubtle country-rock guitarist (his resume included work with Stephen Stills), an adequate studio musician who, with his flowy, Frampton-esque blond locks and wistful tenor projected a youthful naivete completely antithetical to Kath’s lusty spirituals. As mismatched with the band as he was, he was actually central to a couple of the best moments on Chicago 13, including the record’s second single, a hard-driving, southern-rock flavored stomper called “Must Have Been Crazy” (which nicked the Billboard Hot 100 peaking at No. 83) and the upbeat album-closing pep-talk “Run Away” in which Dacus and Cetera tag-team the verses before rallying together in harmony on a triumphant chorus.
Dacus, who, in 1979 appeared as Woof in Milos Forman’s film adaptation of the musical Hair, was fired from the band after Chicago 13, and though he joined an 80s-era incarnation of the power-pop institution Badfinger, he has been virtually absent from music ever since. Time has been unkind to Dacus’s contributions to Chicago, and he is, to my mind, unfairly maligned by many of my other fellow Chicago fanatics. The major problem is that Dacus’s tenure fell squarely in between the band’s two heydays, and, only appearing on a couple of decidedly unsuccessful singles, his voice, unlike Kath’s or Cetera’s or, later, Bill Champlin’s (who sang lead on three of Chicago 19’s singles including “Look Away”) never had a chance to become one of the recognizable voices of the Chicago. Hearing Dacus singing “Must Have Been Crazy” – really one of the strongest singles Chicago released in the 70s, despite the fact that the band’s signature horn section had gone suddenly M.I.A. – you’d never mistake this Chicago for the band that recorded either early hits like “Saturday in the Park” and “If You Leave Me Now” or latter-day power-ballads like “Hard To Say I’m Sorry” and “Hard Habit To Break”.
Fortunately – or unfortunately – another of the band’s “lost years” experiments was their somewhat prescient (though, in hindsight, probably misguided) decision to film an extended promotional video for Chicago 13 which included clips for “Street Player”, “Must Have Been Crazy” and “Run Away”, featuring groaningly cheesy footage of the band hanging out and performing in a secluded mansion – watch as trombonist James Pankow hunts down a fugitive cat and drummer Danny Seraphine gets stranded in a tree, and oh yes, that’s a shirtless Peter Cetera sunning himself on a raft in the swimming pool… ewww – with saxophonist Walt Parazaider providing a Dan Ackroyd-noir voice-over narration. Tellingly, most of the band’s 80s videos would be bland performance clips, although they were much more successful with the comparatively high-budget, three-minute action-flick in song they put out for “Stay the Night” in 1984.
I’ve had a crush on Levi Stubbs for just about as long as I can remember.Of course, when I first developed my crush, I was far too young to realize it was a crush.And well, at 6 or 7 or 8 years old, the idea that I might have a crush on anyone other than Mrs. Simon was so crushingly impossible that it would have been absurd to even consider it.But there it was, and there it grew.And there it still is, even though the man himself is now gone.Because there’s nothing more alive sounding, nothing more urgent, nothing as feral, nothing as sexy, nothing as primal and, quite frankly, necessary as the sound of Levi Stubbs shouting out to “reach on out for me!â€
My parents generally listened to oldies stations when I was growing up, and while I grew to love the music of the 50s and 60s while working in a pizza kitchen my senior year in high school, there was nothing I loved less when I was little than to suffer through a car-ride listening to moldies about cars and girls and surfing.But “Reach Out… I’ll Be There†was one of the songs that cut through my crap.Sure, it probably had something to do with the supernaturally gorgeous music of the song, the haunted fairytale woodwinds, and a bass-line that sounded as much like distant tribal drums – it was like something out of the Arabian Nights.
But more than anything it was that voice.He was telling me to reach out and he’d be there, but by the sound of it, he needed me more.It was as if he’d just been hit by a car, and using every last ounce of life and spirit left in him wanted – needed, more than anything in the world, to reassure me that he would always be a rock in whatever storm might come my way.There have been plenty of storms for me to weather in the 30 years since I first heard his pledge:he’s never failed me yet.
The irony is that a central part of that pledge – the way his voice came across to me on the radio – was, in fact, a calculated emotional manipulation.Song after song, the songwriting-producing team of Holland-Dozier-Holland strategically miscast Stubbs in songs that took him to upper limits of his singing range and then dared him not to jump off.If it often sounds like Stubbs was in pain singing some of these songs, he may very well have been.If it sounds urgent, it’s because so damn many of those notes were Hail Mary gambles for Stubbs.If it sounds like shouting, that’s because – y’know – it is. Every time he opened his mouth on these songs, he was taking a risk. And maybe the risk was just losing his voice, or missing a note, but he made it sound like he was risking his life to get this song out.
Later on, of course, I would begin to connect the sound of Levi Stubbs with the image of the man, which, predictably, only heightened my crush.Stubbs had none of the diabolical ladies-man smoothness of guys like Smokey and Marvin.Barrel-chested, square-jawed and husky with a no-nonsense mustache, he physically resembled the men that my dad hung out with in the tavern after work in nearly every respect (race, of course, being the most obvious difference).He may have been a singer, but you get a sense that Stubbs considered himself a family man breadwinner more than a pop star.
His biography, including his nearly 50-year marriage to wife Clineice (how many pop stars of Stubbs’ stature can claim as much?) also seems to speak to a pragmatic, working-man respect for commitment.Where the Temptations became something of a flagship corporate entity for Motown, with a line-up that changed (and continues to change) like the cast of a long-running TV drama series, the Four Tops, from the day they got together in 1954, remained the very same Four Tops for more than four decades, until the late 90s when the successive deaths of Lawrence Payton and Obie Benson, not to mention Stubbs’ own gradually debilitating struggles with cancer and stroke, did the Tops part.
Stubbs’ commitment to the songs he sang was no less intense, loving, or lasting.From the urgent pleas of “Reach Out – I’ll Be There†to the way he baldly confounds the restraints of a time signature when he shouts out to “Bernadette†at the climactic break of that song.There may be no happier sound in the world than the sound of Levi Stubbs singing “sugar pie, honey bunch, you know that I love youâ€, and there’s almost certainly nothing more emotionally devastating as when, in the song “Ask the Lonelyâ€, he urges us – “Ask me!†– winding the “ask†around a half dozen quickly dispatched notes, but landing on a single, decisive, howl for the “meâ€.
There may be something self-pitying about the moment, but then there’s also something grand, operatic, and selfless about it.When I think of the years after the American Motors plant my dad worked at shut down, and, as a teenager, watching as he was slowly stripped of every shred of his dignity – the early morning repossessions, the foreclosure of the family home, the months spent squatting in a neighbor’s basement or living in a motel while trying to support of family of five kids, nothing feels like a more fitting soundtrack than the voice of Levi Stubbs on “Ask the Lonelyâ€.
My dad, of course, could never have said out loud what he must have been feeling in those awful years without coming across as, well, sort of a pussy.But there were, and are now, probably a lot of guys like my Dad who have felt or are feeling the same things and can’t say so.Ask the folks in Janesville, Wisconsin who are set to lose their jobs two days before Christmas this year.In this context, “Ask the Lonely†sounds like a three-minute opera for the stoic working class.And Stubbs’ performance of the song – and virtually every song he sang – was audacious in its emotional abandon, its sense that some feelings are too strong and too important to let vulgar pride or fragile dignity get in the way of voicing them.
As sad as I am to hear of Levi Stubbs’ death, I also know that as long as I’ve got ears to hear, he’ll be there.When my life is filled with much confusion until happiness is just an illusion and my world around is crumblin’ down, he’ll be there.This is more than a crush, really, isn’t it?
Ba-psssshhh! Dis generay-SHUN, brrrrap! ruuules the nay-TION, brrrrrap! with VER-shun!!