THE CHAMBERS BROTHERS: SHOUT! (1968)
1) Johnny B. Goode; 2) Blues
Get Off My Shoulder; 3) I Got It; 4) Shout; 5) There She Goes; 6) Seventeen; 7)
Pretty Girls; 8) Rained The Day You Left; 9) So Fine; 10) Love Me Like The Rain.
In the mid-to-late Sixties, the Chambers
Brothers had pretty much two parallel
careers going on: the adapt-to-new-reality «psychedelic» one, and a more
traditional one — supported by their old label, Vault Records, who apparently
had so much material in stock and so much free time on their hands that they
could allow themselves to issue at least one «new» album per year without
anybody really giving a damn. Since I assume that all of them were released
without the artist's consent, hearing them is a strictly completist affair, and
one must always be careful when going through the Brothers' discography: at the
very least, remember to look at the label before going all indignant about the
subpar quality of the material and the shitty quality of the recording, like I
just went for a brief while before composing myself and remembering to do just
that.
In this case, fortunately, the results are not
all bad, but still messy. One side is given over to live recordings, probably
from 1965-66, the other side consists of studio outtakes (including, for
instance, a brief and concise take on ʽSo Fineʼ that is overall more listenable
than the pointlessly endless version on Now!).
The live side starts out quite inauspiciously, with a mediocre version of
ʽJohnny B. Goodeʼ that lacks true rock'n'roll excitement and seems to think
that replacing Chuck Berry's lead guitar playing with Mississippi-style
harmonica might be a good idea. But things pick up later, with a convincing
slow blues number (ʽBlues Get Off My Shoulderʼ — here, the harmonica fits in
just fine with the heavy, depressing piano chords) and an energetic gospel /
R&B medley of ʽI Got Itʼ and ʽShout!ʼ — the latter part is particularly
interesting, since the predictable yeah-yeah-yeah rave style here is mixed
with the band's first attempts at going psychedelic: they throw in a sharply
distorted, hallucinatory lead guitar part with echo and delay effects,
inconspicuosly transforming the performance from a vocal-driven chant into an
acid jam, something that neither The Yardbirds nor The Who ever really tried
at their early shows (The Who sometimes came close, but they preferred to carry
the music away into the realms of aggression and chaos, rather than psychedelic
tripping).
The studio side is cleaner, louder, but to a
large degree expendable: ʽThere She Goesʼ is a Stones-style blues rocker that
is totally let down by a criminally flabby rhythm section (think ʽNow I've Got
A Witnessʼ with severely loosened screws), ʽSeventeenʼ is slow dark blues that
used to be done far better by Otis Rush (cool gravekeeper falsetto backing
vocals, though), ʽPretty Girlsʼ is second-rate Isley Brothers, and ʽRained The
Day You Leftʼ is third-rate Byrds — though, you have to admit this, having all these styles enacted by the same
bunch of those former country bumpkins is quite a feat by itself. The only
salvageable track here is the lovely ʽLove Me Like The Rainʼ, an original folk
ballad played and recorded with exquisite tenderness, and also somewhat
unusual in its combination of gentle folk chord picking and low-pitched lead
vocals (typically, you associate The Byrds or The Searchers with this kind of
sound). However, this is actually an alternate version — a much better produced
one can be found as a bonus track on The
Time Has Come, implying that Columbia ultimately got the better side of the
deal.
Still, while this was clearly an obsolete
release for 1968, out of the two Chambers Brothers albums that came out this
year I would rate Shout! as the
superior one — with the exception of ʽJohnny B. Goodeʼ, nothing here seems
particularly irritating. This was
their usual shtick: trying to prove to the world that they could do passable
imitations of 'em all, and it is a more honorable shtick, I believe, than
milking the exact same «Artistic Formula» a second time. In other words,
mediocre music that accepts its own mediocrity is preferable to mediocre music
that pretends to be something more than what it really is. Plus, that version
of ʽShoutʼ is actually worth hearing just for the sake of novelty.
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