"Made in Nigeria" Part 8 up on Boogieheads! in heah!

If you subscribe to the Boogieheads Show (and if not, why not?) then you probably heard this about three weeks ago, but Obafunkie has been having a little difficulty updating www.Boogieheads.com so November's show is still up over there.

Until things get ironed out, you can check out the last episode HERE.

(Apologize again for the crap production--your boy is still getting the hang of this podcasting business and I hadn't yet upgraded my kit back in November when I recorded this.)


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This Song Been In My Mind All Week

The Sylvers - "Wish That I Could Talk To You"

> S I G H <

April 4, 1971: The Stairsteps on The Barbara McNair Show ((IN COLOR))

Dunno... Just had a hankering for that Windy City soul today...

That's a young, pre-P-Funk Jerome "Bigfoot" Brailey on the drums, by the by.

Ahh... what the hell. Since we're looking at YouTube videos featuring 1971 performances by juvenile soul groups, here's the Voices of East Harlem at the Soul to Soul concert in Accra, Ghana on March 6, 1971.



Man... The crowd was feeling it! (And can you blame them?) They seem a lot more hype than they were during Ike & Tina's set:



I remember reading somewhere that it was not so much that they weren't into the music per se, but the conservative and painfully polite Ghanaian audience just wasn't sure how to react to a woman such as Tina (and those fine-ass Ikettes).

(Why yes, I am somewhat bored today! How did you guess?)

Groovin' on some sunshine soul: The Free Movement

Doesn't that sound positively nifty?

That, children, is the sound of The Free Movement, though it's okay if you mistook it for The Fifth Dimension. (Then again, it's not okay; after all, I already wrote the name of the band in the subject line, didn't I? What are you anyway, thick?)

Much like 5D, the FM were aimed squarely at AM... radio, that is. Their well-scrubbed, studio-polished lite soul was an analogue to the kind of chirpy, pristinely-produced pop-rock being offered by bands like The Mamas & The Papas, The Association, Millennium and Spanky & Our Gang--a style that has since been retroactively dubbed "sunshine pop." Hence, I like to think of The Free Movement as "sunshine soul"; this category would also include the likes of The Friends of Distinction and maybe some of Dionne Warwick(e)'s stuff, too.

The Free Movement was composed of six singers--three female and three male--who came together in early 1971 and hit the ground running with the top 10 single "I've Found Someone of My Own" (which would be a top 5 country hit for Cal Smith the following year).

The next single, "The Harder I Try (The Bluer I Get)" performed decently in late 1971 and was quickly followed by the longplayer I've Found Someone Of My Own in 1972. Another single followed, but by the end of 1972, The Free Movement had vanished into the ether. It's not hard to understand why--by the early 1970s, the general tone of American pop music landscape was becoming progressively darker and there was little room for chromatic, optimistic pop ditties. Even soul music, traditionally fueled on the virtue of pure hope, had turned to paranoid, cynical sentiments as expressed in The O'Jay's "Back Stabbers" and "Don't Call Me Brother," Sly & The Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On and Norman Whitfield's productions for The Temptations.

While much has been written in recent years about "psychedelic soul," sunshine soul is mostly ignored, excluded even from the playlists of soul oldies radio stations. That's messed up, man.

Check out their rousing (but polite) version of Stephen Stills' "Love The One You're With":



I wonder if The Free Movement's name was in any way inspired by The Free Design. That would be a gas, eh?

Dude sounds like a lady: Arnold Blair

Arnold Blair was a singer signed to Curtis Mayfield's Curtom Records during the label's most creatively fertile period in the early 1970s--its roster included Linda Clifford, The Natural Four, June Conquest, The Notations, and the great, under-extolled singer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Leroy Hutson, who co-wrote with Blair 1975's "Trying To Get Next To You":



Blair contributed background vocals to a bunch of other Curtom records but as far as I know, "Trying To Get Next To You" is his only release under his own name, with the majestic ballad "I Won The Big Deal" on the B side (and yes, he totally sounds like a chick on that cut, too). The 7" has long been one of the most coveted platters on the rare groove circuit, and it easily fetches hundreds of dollars upon its periodical appearances on the collectors market. One of the aspects of this record that soulkids find eternally fascinating is that for a record from 1975, it sounds so darn "modern," almost like something the Mizell Brothers or Roy Ayers could have produced in the late 70s or early 80s.

I sometimes wonder what happened to Arnold Blair after Curtom closed its doors in 1980. The most recent credit I've seen for him was a 1996 gospel album, and his name isn't even on the cover. Neither is his face. I've never seen a picture of him.




For some reason, I always imagine him looking like Randy Watson, though.