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In the final chapter of his great book on Southern R&B, Sweet Soul Music, Peter Guralnick describes a curious phenomenon familiar to any long-term fan of any genre in popular music. "I've attended sessions in Memphis and Mississippi that have featured all the legendary players of yore," he writes with obvious reluctance, "and it's not that they are any less accomplished or that their playing represents any significant departure; it is simply that what they are playing does not come out the same."
This summer the legendary label, Stax Records, a central subject of Guralnick's book, has been relaunched, not as a vehicle for reissues from its storied catalogue but as a channel for new recordings in the same tradition. Two of the initial wave of albums come from major figures in Stax history, Eddie Floyd and Steve Cropper, themselves key characters in the book. To read this news is to be filled with helpless longing for not just their youth but also for our own, for those days when Floyd's voice and Cropper's guitar leapt from the jukebox and into our tingling hands as we reached for the adolescent dancer before us. And the disappointment of these records is ultimately not in the performers as much as in ourselves.
For it's not that Floyd and Cropper are any less skilled than they once were; if anything, years of sessions and gigs have only deepened Floyd's tone and subtlety, have only honed Cropper's timing and phrasing. It's not that they've radically altered their musical approach; most of the 22 tracks on these two albums could have been recorded at Stax Studios in East Memphis 40 years ago, even if they would have been pushed off the singles in favor of stronger songs. And it's not as if the two men are resting on their laurels and coasting; they are working hard and delivering a measure of satisfaction. It's just that Floyd and Cropper once changed people's lives with their music, and there's nothing on these two records that will change anyone's life.
Perhaps that's an impossible standard for anyone to meet. Perhaps we should just be glad for the small pleasures that aging talents can still provide. Perhaps that's how we should judge our own lives. Perhaps we'd feel less frustration in our 50s and 60s if we would stop expecting the transformational experiences we had in our youth and would appreciate the rewards of exercising our accumulated skills and knowledge. Perhaps.
The catalysts for Eddie Floyd's new album, Eddie Loves You So, are guitarist Mike Dinalla and drummer Ducky Carlisle. These two alumni of Barrence Whitfield & the Savages approached Floyd about making a new album and not only played on the ensuing sessions but also engineered, produced and mixed the results on their own Boston turf. Dinalla and Carlisle aren't Cropper and Al Jackson, but they come pretty close to the Booker T. & the MGs' sound, a sound they clearly love.
Spotlighting Floyd as a songwriter, the project includes two new compositions, two from his solo records, four that he wrote for other singers and two associated with Floyd's first band, the Falcons. Floyd was a terrific writer, able to cook down his melodies, rhythms and lyrics to tasty, bite-size phrases. He could sum up romantic longing not just in the title of "Never Get Enough of Your Love" (a small-label single in 1964) but also in the guitar triplet that rises again and again with insatiable hunger. He could sum up sexual desire not only in a title like "'Til My Back Ain't Got No Bone" (recorded by both William Bell and Esther Phillips in the early ‘70s) but also in the repeating bass figure that seems to hold back till it can't help but leap forward.
Floyd's tenor is in good shape, especially on the slow and midtempo numbers that dominate this collection. He still has those warm, smoky overtones that are so effective in a pledge of fidelity like "I Will Always Have Faith in You" (an R&B hit for Carla Thomas in 1967) or in a blatant come-on like "Consider Me" (a non-single album track for Floyd in 1969). Unlike so many modern R&B singers, he never over-embellishes, trusting his unadorned delivery to carry all the emotion he needs. And his two new songs, the purring seduction of "Close to You" and double entendres and John Lee Hooker boogie of "Head to Toe," fit right in with the rest.
But there's a moment near the end of "You Don't Know What You Mean to Me," a 1968 R&B hit for Sam & Dave and one of the few uptempo numbers on the new album, when the song gets ready to shift into a higher gear of ecstatic gospel for the coda and Floyd finds that he just doesn't have that gear anymore. The same thing happens on "Never Get Enough of Your Love" and "You're So Fine" (the Falcons' huge 1959 pop hit when Floyd sang back-up to Joe Stubbs). The talent and the know-how are still there, but the power boost is gone.
The catalyst for the new album from Steve Cropper and Felix Cavaliere, Nudge It Up A Notch, is Jon Tiven, the songwriter-producer who shepherded three of the best tribute albums ever assembled--those for Otis Blackwell, Don Covay and Curtis Mayfield on Shanachie Records in the early ‘90s. Tiven co-produced this new disc with the two leaders and resisted the temptation to add a lot of guest artists--the curse of most comeback albums. It's just Cropper on guitar, Cavaliere on vocals and keys, John Fogerty's Chester Thompson on drums and Mayfield's Shake Anderson on bass.
Cavaliere was never signed to the original Stax Records, of course, but his band the Young Rascals scored their first big hit in 1966 with "Mustang Sally," a song that had been a #15 R&B single the year before for its composer, Sir Mack Rice, Floyd's ex-bandmate in the Falcons. Cavaliere had been a terrific soul singer back in the ‘60s, and he's still respectable now, though like Floyd he's lost his higher gear. Cropper, by contrast, sounds better than ever, and on several tunes reveals his fondness for blues guitarists such as Freddie King and Albert Collins.
The problem with Nudge It Up A Notch is that most of the songs--all written specifically for this project by Cropper, Cavaliere and Tiven--are genre exercises. It was as if the three men sat around and wondered what it would sound like if they tried to write and record a new Curtis Mayfield song ("To Make It Right"), a new Bob Marley song ("Imperfect World"), a new Stevie Wonder song ("Still Be Loving You"), a new Robert Cray song ("One of Those Days") or a new Teddy Pendergrass song ("Impossible"). What the songs would sound like, it turns out, are expert imitations but imitations just the same. Cropper leads the way on four instrumentals, but only the last one, "Love Appetite," approaches the compact catchiness of his work with Booker T. & the MGs. And the quasi-hip-hop number, "Make the Time Go Faster," is just embarrassing.
But amid all the uninspired professionalism and the misguided attempts at hipness, there is one undeniable gem. "If It Wasn't for Loving You" begins with one of Cropper's lilting guitar figures over Cavaliere's simmering organ chords. The singer, sounding as unhurried and focused as he did on "Groovin'," apologizes to a lover for yesterday's misunderstanding in the verse and on the chorus gives in so completely to a pledge of love, rising and falling on the melody like a float on the waves, that there can be no doubt of his intentions. Cropper's guitar scratches at the singer's optimism with worrying, clipped chords and pushes Cavaliere into a higher restatement of the hook: "If it wasn't for loving you, what would I do?"
It's the kind of unexpected moment late in a performer's career that confounds all assumptions, raises unreasonable expectations and creates impatience with anything less. It's the kind of decade-spanning echo of past brilliance that shakes an older listener and makes one question all over again how much one should hope for and how much one should accept.
