Eugene McDaniels – Outlaw (1970)

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Eugene McDaniels
“Outlaw”
Released on Atlantic (SD 8259) 1970

1 Outlaw 5:00
2 Sagitarius Red 3:03
3 Welfare City 2:52
4 Silent Majority 4:10
5 Love Letter To America 3:57
6 Unspoken Dreams Of Light 6:40
7 Cherrystones 3:08
8 Reverend Lee 6:31
9 Black Boy 2:59

Bass – Ron Carter
Drums – Ray Lucas
Engineer – Bob Liftin , Dean Evenson
Guitar – Eric Weissberg , Hugh McCracken
Percussion – Buck Clarke
Piano – Mother Hen
Producer – Joel Dorn

Recorded at Regent Sound Studios, NYC

With special thanks to
Les McCann

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“She’s a nigger in jeans, she’s an outlaw, she don’t wear a bra.”
With opening lines like these, you know you are in for a weird trip.

Eugene McDaniels may be famous (or infamous) for `Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse` but for my money (which isn’t much these days), THIS album has the songs! Also, while that album has the reputation for being the one that prompted Spiro Agnew to tap his phone, I have a strong feeling the spying started with “Outlaw”. I mean, they’re holding a rifle on the album cover, and “Love Song to America” declares him an enemy of the state (albeit unwilling).

Eugene McDaniels may be famous (or infamous) for `Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse` but for my money (which isn’t much these days), THIS album has the songs! One of the weirdest career trajectories in music, McDaniels had gone from an early 60s R&B hit maker, as Gene McDaniels, with songs like “100 lbs of Clay”, then seemingly taken a few years away from music, and reemerged with this militant, bizarre, and utterly seductive music. If I remember correctly he had begun working on this album while in the studio with Bobby Hutcherson recording the amazing album “Now!” Only one of the tunes on this album is really reminiscent of that masterpiece, “Unspoken Dreams of Light”, loaded with jazz intervals and trippy, convoluted lyrics about a coming bloody revolution sweeping the country. It’s a rock-funk-folk arrangement, I suppose, but the refrain sounds like it was left over from “Now.”

Every song on here is very literally great. McDaniels’ vocals are amazing, both emotionally stirring and also full of swagger and attitude. There is a twang to some of the tunes and especially Hugh McCracken’s and Eric Weissberg’s guitar licks that might invite comparisons to the Rolling Stones of this era. You can say that if you like, McDaniels probably would have not have objected to the comparison, but in a profound way these two albums of McDaniels are everything the Stones wanted to be in 1970. Black, for one thing, but incendiary, funky, roots-laden, gospel-tinged soul and rock music that truly must have made the so-called “Silent Majority” tremble in their straight-laced shoes with its scathing social criticisms, dark ironic humor, and sharply articulated anger. How is the listener supposed to react to the folk strumming of “Welfare City” whose chorus is, “la la la, la la la la la, la la, la la la la la, smoke a joint” ?? Well, just sing along I guess. By the end of the tune, with layered vocal harmonies, it sounds as catchy as “I’d Like To Give The World a Coke.”

“Silent Majority” is sadly as relevant today as it was in 1970. For those too young to know the history of that phrase, it was what the reactionary Nixon-era conservatives called themselves during the “cultural revolution” of leftist politics, free love, drugs, and rock and roll. McDaniels calls them out on their hypocrisy and also makes the astute observation that they weren’t really all that ‘silent.’ Unfortunately these same types of people are even more organized now, and still claim to speak for the “majority” of Americans, representing true patriotism, and calling anyone who disagrees with them a communist. These days, they call themselves The Tea Party.

McDaniels would never again make records like this one and “Headless Heroes”. It seems as if he has never said much publicly about them (silenced by the Kissinger-blessed majority??). It almost seems as if he is not aware, or simply uninterested, in the profound influence this music had on the relatively few people who have had the privilege of hearing it. These are underground classics loved by fans of rock, soul, and funk, have been name-checked by all kinds of hipsters. There was an article devoted to Daniels in the respectable magazine (I mean that sincerely) Wax Poetics, but I don’t remember what it said. Also can’t figure out what issue it was in but it seems to have been included in the second `anthology` in book form. Anyone who wants to scan it and post it here, be my guest. The guy is kind of a mystery to me in a lot of ways.

McDaniels was a good friend and colleague of Roberta Flack during this period, and wrote classic tunes in her repertoire like “Compared to What?” and “Reverend Lee” (his version of this latter tune is MUCH stranger, and longer), both of which became stables of Flack’s repertoire during the early 70s. McDaniels also penned one of her huge hits, “Feel Like Making Love”, which won him a Grammy. Again, ….what the fuck? How does one go from making THIS record, to winning a Grammy for a love song just a few years later??? He has also written material for Aretha Franklin.

Gene McDaniels is still around, he has a website, a Facebook account, and a You Tube channel. He has even released some music recently, about which I knew nothing until yesterday when researching for this upload.

This was one of my first vinyl rips, made on my Music Hall turntable, a Parasound preamp, and recorded using a Tascam digital recorder at 24/96 resolution. I think it sounds warm and musical, but someday I may rip it with my new setup, after I get the album out of storage from my bunker in the Kayman Islands. Apparently this was released on CD by Water Records but I never knew that until yesterday and have never come across it. I find their mastering to be cold and harsh on everything I have by them — although they usually release amazing, essential music – so I am quite happy with this for the moment.

I photographed the album with my Nikon D80 but.. I have no idea what I did with the files. So I have included some album cover scans I found on an interesting blog devoted to vinyl album art. ENJOY!!

Ripping specs:
Music Hall MMF.5 Turntable with Goldring 1012GX cartridge, Gyger II diamond stylus, and MK II XLR Ringmat –> Pro-ject Speedbox II -> Parasound Z Phono Preamp -> Marantz PMD 661 digital recorder at 24/96khz .Declicked on very light settings with Click Repair -> DC Offset and track splitting in Adobe Audition 2.0 Dithering to 16-bit in IzoTope RX Advanced using M-Bit algorithm. Converted to FLAC and mp3 with DbPoweramp. Tagged properly with Foobar 2000.

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in 320 kbs em pee tré

in FLAC LAWLESS AUDIO 16-bit / 44.1khz

in FLAC LAWLESS AUDIO 24-bit / 96 khz ‘hi-rez’ format

special secret weather underground communist conspiracy pass-phrase in the comments section

Nara Leão – O Canto Livre de Nara (1965)

nara leao
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NARA LEÃO
O Canto Livre de Nara
1965, Philips #632.748
CD reissue, 2002 Japan release (courtesy of Kung)

Nara Leão was a very busy woman in the 1960s. After all it is not easy being The Muse of Bossa Nova. By 1965, however, she was broadening the scope of her work to incorporate “musica engajada,” a type of protest folk music that was gaining momentum in the wake of the 1964 military coup and the dictatorship that followed and would endure for twenty years. The first song, Corisco, is from the film Deus e Diabo na Terra do Sol released the previous year, a film directed by Glauber Rocha, who co-wrote the song.. Probably the pinnacle of the Cinema Novo movement, and certainly its best-known offering, this song would have been an immediate cultural reference point to the students, artists, and intellectuals that were following Cinema Novo. The song was the main theme for the character of the same name, a lieutenant of the bandit Lampião. Lampião has honorary status as Brazil’s equivalent of Robin Hood, a bit of a hyperbolic comparison since Lampião wasn’t quite as discriminating in, um, dispensation of vigilante justice. In fact he was as feared by the rural poor as he was by the wealthy landowners of the northeast Brazilian backlands, and it was only during and after the Brazilian military pursued and hunted his gang that he became an icon of peasant resistance. Brazil had just changed from being a monarchy to a Republican government. For a variety of complicated reasons – including the fact that the monarchy ended slavery in Brazil (the last place in the Western Hemisphere to do so) as one of its last official acts – the fall of the monarchy was not quite the occasion to celebrate that one might imagine. In fact there was a growing sense among the rural poor that they were getting a raw deal, and the early years of the Republic saw an efflorescence of various kinds of protest, unrest, revolts, millenarian movements… Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol deals with all of this, including a direct reference to the “colony” of Canudos led by messianic itinerant preacher Antônio Conselheiro, a place which promised redemption to thousands of rural poor seeking a release from the stranglehold of sharecropping and other types of tenant arrangements left in the wake of slavery. Canudos grew to somewhere in the area of 35,000 people, and concerned the new government enough for them to send the military to put a stop to it — which, eventually and after several attempts where the army was embarrassingly beaten back — they eventually did. With a bloody and brutal massacre which became an emblem of the “order and progress” that was, no matter how you want to analyze it, built upon the blood, sweat, and brutality of a slavocratic system.

Why is this important to a Nara Leão album in 1965? Because the story of Canudos is known by all Brazilians. It is part of the curriculum of the school system. Euclides da Cunha immortalized it in his book Os Sertões, an instant classic that went into numerous reprintings almost immediately and was translated into English by the 1940s. The story of Lampião, his lover Maria Bonita, and their band of merry madmen is equally party of the cultural fabric. When Glauber Rocha made these two scenarios a central part of a film released in 1964, he was doing so for a reason. I am no film scholar, but his lens captures visually and narrates both the optimism for change and the anguish of seeing it thwarted. Repeatedly. Cyclically. In Rocha’s narrative, the cattle rustler Manuel is done wrong and taken advantage one time too many by a wealthy ‘coronel’ or rural boss, and he murders him during a fight over his pay. He flees with his wife to the “Holy Mountain”, the analog of Canudos mentioned above. That, well.. that doesn’t work out so well either, and he ends up seeking refuge once more, this time with what is left of Lampião’s band, now led by his lieutenant, the rather ill-tempered and erratic Corisco (also an actual historic figure). The song that follows Corisco’s character throughout the film is an unfolding variation on one musical theme, really. Also titled elsewhere, “Perseguição” (Persecution), the lyrics alternate between a coronel’s command to “deliver Corisco” to answer for his crimes and a peasant’s refusal to do so. The song contains the memorable lines of prophecy, repeated elsewhere in all manner of songs, films, books — “O sertão vai vira o mar, e o mar vai vira sertão” — The desert will turn into the sea, and the sea will turn to desert.

Nara Leão was not randomly choosing this song to open up her album. She had thrown in her lot with the “música engajada” crowd, best typified in the work of Geraldo Vandré, Zé Keti and João do Vale. She had participated in a show with Keti and João do Vale that was also released on record in 196, and their material dominates this record. This new protest music was drawing on the musical traditions of forró, xote, and baião. Deeply northeastern in melodic and rhythmic structure, and alongside the rather long ‘Fisherman’s Suite’ of Dorival Caymmi, the inclusion of this material in Nara Leão’s repertoire makes it pretty clear that we are no longer solely dealing with the beaches of Ipanema and Leblon here. The final song is an anonymously authored tune in the public domain, a song sung by holy men and women in the northeast who would make their livelihood from praying day and night , which Nara mixes with a stanza from the modernist-yet-archetypically-Northeastern poet João Cabral de Melo Netto.

Don’t believe me? The liner notes from Ferreira Gullar write of Nara consciously pursuing and deepening the road she had set out on with her ‘Opinão’ album, of augmenting her role as a singer with that of interpreting “the problems and aspirations of her people.” He writes of Nara wanting to use her voice to “bring… to the largest possible number of people, a contemporary undrestanding of the Brazilian reality, that she feels and identifies in the compositions of Caymmi, of João do Vola, of Zé Keti, of Edu Lobo, of Vinicius and of many others.” According to Gullar, Nara was interested in communicating through song a form of discussion, of dialog with a public. In 1965, the dreams of the post-Kubitschek Brazilian left for a more just society had not yet faded. Both the ideas of “dialog” and even of “a public” to have it with still seemed plausible.

“To sing of love and of life, the love that belongs to all as life does. To sing of solidarity, of peace, and of liberty. Nara discovered that it is possible and it is necessary to make into a reality the idea that all men are equal and that, as a singer, she can contribute to this. And Nara contributes to this as much when she sings of the suffering of the landless peasant, as when she interprets an old samba love-song. Because, to bring together these themes seemingly so different, she teaches us, in the knowledge of her youth, that love, peace, labor, and liberty are synonymous with life.”

Oh, and the music? Yes, well, that is pretty damn good too. The populist vanguardisms are tempered by lean ensemble work, laying out a jazz groove for Nara to carry on her work of conscientização. The band is led by the ubiquitous Luiz Eça, best known for being at the heart of the Tamba Trio. Also helping out with musical coordination is Dori Caymmi. The lineup looks like this:

Luiz Eça – piano
Bass – Bebeto
Drums – Ohana
Flute – Bebeto
Guitar – Dor
i Caymmi
Backing vocals – Peter and his voice orchestra…

Nara Leão – O Canto Livre de Nara (1965)
in 320 kbs
in FLAC LOSSLESS

Linton Kwesi Johnson – LKJ , A Capella Live (1996)

I wasn’t sure if I should share this here without first sharing some of LKJ’s musical records first. But I decided it’s worth it. For one, this record is a bit harder to find than his landmark late 70s dub/reggae albums. But also because in many ways it makes a perfect introduction to his work, since he began his career as a published poet rather than a recording artist. For anyone interested in reggae, Caribbean cultural history, in poetry – Linton is a crucial figure. His literary output recently gained him recognition as one of the only living writers to be considered a ‘Twentieth Century master’ or something like that by Penguin Books, in a recent collection. I saw LKJ speak last year and left hoping that these accolades, however hard-earned, would not change him. It seemed he felt compelled to give a more academic presentation along the lines of a lecture on the poetics of Jamaican dub toasters, and only read a few of his own poems. This was a shame, as hearing him read his own work is infinitely more powerful than hearing him situate it intellectually in some kind of canon. In that spirit, I share this record. If you don’t get it after hearing this, you probably never will, no matter how many intellectual gymnastics you do.

Linton Kwesi Johnson – LKJ A capella Live (1996) – HERE!

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