Original Cast – Dirty Words 1974
(MP3 NOT SAFE FOR WORK)

Earl Wilson Jr. must have been on a one man mission to make sex totally unappealing when he wrote his “sexual musical” in 1973.

“Let My People Come” is as dated as people-fucking-around-and-not-getting-AIDS but thanks to the powers of vinyl we can still enjoy the “theatrical emancipation” of more pleasant times, including such classics as “I’m Gay”, “Linda, Georgina, Marilyn & Me” and “The Cunnilingus Champion Of Co. C”.

I was going to upload the solo number “Come In My Mouth” but I think the googlestorm it would incur would be detrimental to the site’s focus. Instead I’ve recorded “Dirty Words” for you to listen to. You may want to keep a sexual partner nearby whilst listening in case you get the urge to do someone.

The blurb on the back says the production “touches upon all forms of human sexuality in the disguise of a thought-provoking, suggestive, bitingly satirical, outrageously refreshing, innocent and entertaining childish romp”.
If nothing else, it certainly bites.

The confirmation that it’s an anti-sex musical comes below…

“The message: People are sexual, if only because they are human and mortal, and if they understand and deal with that fact they will be able to move on to something else, something more spiritual.”

I’m off to have an outrageously refreshing cold shower.

Original Broadway Cast – Go Where I Send Thee 1962

Langston Hughes was the original and best gay rapper. Political rapper too. Very good.

One of the many things on his CV is adapting the story of the nativity for the stage. For 160 gospel singers on the stage. A whole lot of Jesus.

The production is mostly made up of well known carols sung gospel style but includes some original Hughes songs. The original production opened on Broadway in 1961 (which was some feat for an all black musical) and featured an all-star gospel cast including Marion Williams, Princess Stewart and Alex Bradford.

They’ve performed it 38 years in a row in Boston, I think its a bit of an institution.

Mixing stage shows and gospel, strips the gospel of some of its church fire but perhaps leaves it a little tidier, which on this recording often makes the soloists’ voices stand out more than usual.

The production came to London on tour in the early 60s and was by all accounts a phenomenal success, attracting secular audiences not used to such fervour in British theatres. Apparently your Rolling Stones and the like were there, nicking ideas and minstrelling it up, bless ‘em.

You can get the album on CD now and if you like the above rendition of “Children, go where I send thee”, I reccomend you do. It’s a fine meeting of traditions, performed with all the fire and passion of a vengeful god. Very good.

Joe LaBenz IV and Co. – Alligators All Around1981

Maurice Sendak has been the man for a while. You know “Where The Wild Things Are” and you probably know “In The Night Kitchen”. You really should anyway.

His “Rosie” lives in the same magical kingdom of Brooklyn that Sendak helped create in Sesame Street. I’ve not seen much of Brooklyn but I prefer to think of it as a city populated by charismatic children, puppets of all races and the service industry workers that see to thier needs, rather than just the borough of New York it seemed to be when I crossed the bridge.

“This Sign On Rosie’s Door” is a truly great childrens book. The art is a lot scratchier and inkier than Sendak’s most famous books but it’s expressive cartooning at its best and may be my favourite work of his.

Anyway I’m not here to talk about kids books but rather the musical adaptation of one. On a scale of “having Ben Elton do the story for your music” to “having Carole King do the music for your story” this is the latter. The “Rosie” is a little on the obnoctious Annie side for my tastes but then she is in the book so I shouldn’t hold that against it. The other kids are great and much less professional. The LP also includes the dialogue which is pretty unusual for musical albums. The dialogue is the best bit, most of it coming straight from Sendak’s books. The LP was issued by one of my favourite labels, Caedmon who released the cream of spoken word albums for about 40 years before being swallowed up by Harper-Collins. I’ll buy pretty much anything on Caedmon but more of that another time…

The above song is actually a book in its own right. If you need a new ABCs guide you could do a lot worse than “Alligators All Around”. There’s an animated version of “Really Rosie” too.

This is, I assume, all ubiquitous in America but to me its part of the mystical world of American childrens culture, of Carl Sandburg, Russel Hoban and Charles Shulz. Where children are complicated and rule the world.

Makes me happy.

Tiger Haynes – Slide Some Oil To Me 1975

Everyone likes musicals right? Me neither. So this week I’m posting on musicals.

The 1975 Broadway musical “The Wiz” was Frank L. Baum’s “The Wizard Of Oz” with an all black cast, some lazy black slang and some (not a lot of) black influence to the music. Mostly its The Wizard Of Oz with less memorable songs.
It made a star of Stephanie Mills who was to reprise her role as Dorothy for the 1978 Motown Productions film version. Well she was, until the blatantly-evil Diana Ross got Universal to pay Motown to let her play Dorothy instead, even though she was already about a hundred years old and posessed the voice of a particularly fragile rice cake. I’m not all mad at the film though cos it’s got MJ and Richard Pryor in it, surely the greatest team-up this side of Superman and Richard Pryor.

The best thing about The Wiz is playing the “Who would you cast in a new version of The Wiz” game. I have played this game a number of times with my compatriots. At the moment my ideal cast for a new The Wiz movie would be:

Amerie as Dorothy. She’s got a big stagey voice and those thighs could definitely get her some way down the yellow brick road without her needing a Segway or a lie down in an opium field.

Lil’ Wayne as Scarecrow. Can’t you imagine Weezy all dressed up in the costume with his dreads and straw hanging out and everything? He also has the requisite campness. Yidigg.

50 Cent as Tinman. Currrtisss sounds like one of the computer voices on my Mac and in a new version of the Wiz the Tinman would obviously be some kind of mandroid, just like 50 Cent or Robocop (both shot 9 times, don’t you know?). To accomodate 50’s penchant for going shirtless he’d just be painted silver like the Silver Surfer. This would also help the new version’s budget. The original movie grossed only $12 million dollars after costing $22 million to make. Shame.

Diana Ross as Evillene. How it should have been cast originally. Still works. If she’s not up to it then get Whitney. I like Whitney, I’m just saying.

Robert Sylvester Kelly as The Wiz. Obv.

Anyways the above track is from the original stage version. The LP is mainly worth owning (IMO) for the work of top class Jazz drummer Grady Tate who gets a nice funk workout on this Tinman solo. In fact the other really good tune on the album is a soul number by the Tinman. Tinman wins. Now click your heals together four times and say some stereotype shit.

Albert Ayler – Heart Love 1968

Albert Ayler was the posterboy of free Jazz. He had the right beard, he wore black rollnecks, he was down with the Black Power movement, he was unmelodic to the point of R2D2 and he sure as hell wasn’t a sellout.
In 1968 he “sold out” and made an R&B record. Or at least that’s what his fans and Jazz historians will tell you. The idea that the masses would want to hear a funk record with avant-garde jazz solos all over it is bloody ridiculous. Anyway sellout he was and as wikipedia says, the album “New Grass” “is reviled by his fans and generally considered to be the worst of his work”.

The fact that the album features Albert screaming some soul down a saxophone over beats from funk legend Bernard Purdie doesn’t matter to them. It mixes with other forms of black music and is therefore worthless to the Jazz fundamentalists. They blame his girlfriend. They blamed Miles’ girlfriend for “Bitches Brew” a couple of years later. Jazz is for men of course and Jazz does not go down on its girlfriend.

The album features Ayler alternating between a somewhat avant-garde take on the R&B sax he played in bars as a teenager, the wild soloing he was known for in the 60s and his singing, which is somewhere between amateur soul and the sound of a saxophone. His phrasing is accordingly odd. Helping him with the vocals are “The Soul Singers”, a small girl group (3 voices I think) in a very pop vein. Under that you have his regular bassist Bill Follwell doing a decent, if a little rigid, impression of walking funk bass, there’s some extra R&B brass and even some organ but most of all there is that “Pretty” Purdie beat.

Every track after the spoken/solo Ayler intro incorporates a mean funk beat but where 70s Jazz-Funk has the (by then) established James Brown version of funk and the strung-out post-riots Soul, this fusion is very much a 60s thing. The rhythm is from the funky soul of Aretha Franklin’s pop numbers, of Stax and Atlantic Records. The girl-group vocals are straight-up 60s pop soul. The Jazz on display (which is only really Ayler’s soloing) is very much the Jazz of the 60s as well, while mixing with R&B here it is still a man striving to get new sounds out of his instrument. Purdie was integral to the Joel Dorn helmed Jazz and Soul fusions at Atlantic Records over the following years. Ayler experimented with bagpipes a bit backtracked towards free Jazz on his next LP.

Maybe he did want more people to hear his record, he killed himself two years later after all, but I can’t really believe he ever thought Impulse! Records was going to make a pop hit out of “New Grass”. I can’t even believe it ever got a radio spin. I think it’s more likely a man trying to speak to new people instead of recording another album preaching to the choir.
Regardless, it’s an overlooked, even scorned album that, assuming you’re not goosestepping to the tune of intellectual Jazz zealots, I’d highly recommend.

If you buy a US vinyl copy it will have a gorgeous Impulse! spine. Bonis!