"Soul Sides Volume One" (Zealous)
By Ben Taylor
Friday. Mar 03, 12:59 AM
Doing it to death with a heaping helping of rare and obscure soul.

It’s always nice when someone else does the dirty work and you get to reap the benefits. For the last few years, DJ/writer Oliver Wang has been digging deep in his dusty crates for rare and obscure soul nuggets, digitizing the results and posting them for free download on his audio blog at soul-sides.com. Now Zealous has taken it one step further by working with Wang to compile some of the crème de la crème for this ridiculously funky compilation. Think about it: you don’t have to comb the moldy secondhand shops or overpriced record stores, and you don’t need a high-speed connection, so you can just be a lazy slob and enjoy the funk. And what a mother lode of raw soul it is, from the golden years of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, this is all rootdown vocals, loose-limbed in-the-pocket drums, punchy bass, scratchy rhythm guitar, blaring horns, and the classic icing on the Motown/James Brown cake: the tambourine that’s twice as loud as everything else.

The party gets get off to a gritty start with Charles May And Annette May Thomas’ “Keep My Baby Warm” and keeps right on moving with the stomping “Master Piece” courtesy of Clarence Reid, aka Blowfly the Original Dirty Rapper. But things really pick up in the middle third, starting with the song that later made Janis Joplin’s career, Erma Franklin’s “Piece of My Heart”. Erma may not be as famous as her sister Aretha, but it’s certainly not from lack of talent, and this deep soul rave-up demonstrates that in full-force. Donny Hathaway’s bittersweet reading of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” is a stone-cold classic from his great Live album, and hopefully once people hear this, it will finally be issued on CD domestically. There’s plenty to like with just those two songs alone, an original version of a well-known cover and a stunning cover of a well-known original, but Linda Lyndell’s “What a Man” is the real surprise here. Many will probably recognize it as the sample source and inspiration for En Vogue and Salt-N-Pepa’s 1993 collaboration “Whatta Man,” but Lyndell’s sassy funk workout blows all pretenders out of the water.

There’s a solid 14 cuts here, with the latter half including some amazing slow jams like Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s “Lovin’ You.” It’s wrapped up perfectly with new millennium funk disciples Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings’ soulful string-laden “All Over Again.” Jones and co. always act like they’re The James Brown Soul Revue and it’s still 1968, so their sultry grooves fit perfectly, even though just about every other song here precedes them by a good 30 years.

Soul Sides Volume One is a great purchase, for experts and beginners alike. The tunes will shuffle up great in your iPod, and it will definitely get your next party moving and grooving. Might as well have info cards printed up because people are definitely going to be asking what’s playing. Zealous even meticulously tracked down the original owners of the recordings and legitimately licensed everything, fair and square. And to boot, they’re donating a portion of the proceeds to the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, which provides financial assistance to needy R&B artists from the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. Good intentions and karma aside, none of that would mean a damn thing if the tracks sucked. Like the good folks at Stones Throw and Soul Jazz, Wang went the extra mile in assembling a wide spectrum of lesser-heard dope joints, but with enough familiarity (recognizable names, unexpected covers, sample sources [please please please drop a line if you know where the “I got to tell you” line from Lee Moses’ awesome “Time and Place” has been used]) to keep novices from getting scared off.
www.soul-sides.com
www.zealousrecords.com

Ben Taylor

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