A Little Street Team Work

As I sit here ready to start a day full of article deadlines and some magazine consulting work, I have decided to ruminate on the next few blogs and who I will write about. A little pre-publication “street team” work if you will – you know, do some advance work and get you, the audience, ready for some prime obscure musician/recording writing.

In the next week or so I will be writing about several of my all time soul and jazz faves including soul great Don Covay (any of his albums are good, but there is one obscure blues-based CD he recorded under a group name alias I will be specifically talking about), Memphis soul titan Eddie Hinton (this guy was a genius who could do it all – write songs, play blistering guitar, sing like Otis Redding, and, sadly, have a mental breakdown so severe it cost him his career), organist and hero of mine Jimmy Smith, James Brown’s right hand man and funk-king in his own right Bobby Byrd, the original Do Right Man and brilliant songwriter Dan Penn, and maybe Polk Salad Annie’s best friend Tony Joe White as well.

As you can see, I am on a major soul and jazz kick lately. Over the past year or so I have really become quite bored with rock music. While I am an intense power pop and psyche-rock fan and may decide to do some writing about The Spongetones, Dungen, Willie Wisely, Jellyfish and others of that ilk, by and large most rock is leaving me cold. I am sure it’s just a phase. For a long while, and even continuing to this day, I was up to my earholes in great alt.country music as I embraced my inner banjo-loving redneck. While the feeling isn’t as strong, I still get exciting when bands like the Bottlerockets release new albums (which they just did, the album Zoysia on Bloodshot Records) and make tour stops around the Southeast.

There is so much great obscure music
out there, some of it released by major bands and just forgotten about. For example, did you know both The Tokens and The Four Seasons each released great, obscure, forgotten psyche-rock albums that rank right up there with Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds? Bet you didn’t. Very little recent music makes me smile – but the underground stuff, whether it be vintage or new, is simply great to discover and I am hoping I can bring you to some new stuff that makes you travel down a whole different musical avenue.

Well, that’s it for today. Hopefully you know at least a few of these names, or maybe it’s even better if you don’t. Do a little homework this weekend and check some of them out. Their all great – I wouldn’t tell you about them if they weren’t!

The Music Nerd knows…….