Making Impossible Childhood Memories Come True: The Numero Group Recording Tap Compilation
Written: Mar 30 '08 (Updated Mar 31 '08)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Early rap tracks and disco classics by Jackie Stoudemire and Arnie Love...
Cons: ...that nobody's ever heard (until now).
The Bottom Line: In which the author writes his own completely fabricated memoir. (Everybody's doing it!)
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| plorentz's Full Review: Don't Stop: Recording Tap - Various Artists |
My nose feels drippy underneath my plastic Popeye mask. Although there's been an icy mist all afternoon giving each strong gust of wind millions of tiny teeth to bite against my hands and neck and ears and forearms - the only parts of my body not covered in a bought-at-Shopko costume - my face is on fire from the sharp, wet heat of my breath beneath all that plastic. My physical discomfort is coupled with the fact that we're not, in fact, trick-or-treating, but actually trick-or-treating for UNICEF with a church group, and that while it's certainly easy enough to go up to a stranger's house and ask for candy (in blatant, but somehow sanctioned, defiance of everything Officer Friendly's ever told us), it's not as easy, nor nearly as fun - for either us kids or the unfortunate folks whose porches we happen to land upon - to ask for strangers' spare change. It feels tawdry to me, even though I'm, like, nine years old. And it annoys a lot of our victims. That, and I really wish I had a Kleenex for my nose. Only, even if I did, it would be useless since Popeye's face has been securely plastered over mine by my sweat and snot, and I expect that when I finally do get back to the creature comforts of my bedroom tonight after this long, slow exercise in philanthropical torment, my face will be pale and pruney like my feet after a long bath.
My one consolation is that Mrs. Smith has kindly given me permission to change the radio station in her car to WRKR for the interstitial consolation of hearing the latest hits, like, for instance, that new song by Toto - the one that Casey Kasem says is about an actress I've never heard of - as me and my fellow trick-or-treaters are transported from one forbidding subdivision to the next. It was after one particularly embarrassing and painful trick-or-treat stop that I first heard it. We'd rung her doorbell, heard the barking of her dogs, heard her struggling to get to her door in the midst of all their wild barking and jumping, only to find when she opened the door that she was this frail little old lady with these two gigantic Rottweiler dogs far too big and scary looking to actually belong to an old lady. She struggled to open the door without letting the dogs out (I had just been bitten by a neighbor's Doberman, and was terrified!), all the while commenting on our costumes and digging out a handful of little peanut butter toffees all wrapped in orange and black wax paper to distribute to us. We clarified: "Trick or Treeeeeat... for UNICEF". She had no idea what we were talking about, but soon got the hint as we held up our little brown cardboard boxes. But she didn't have change with her, so she had to go back to the house and there were the dogs following her, and she came out with one of those little rubber change purses with the name and phone number of a local insurance company on the back, and dug out a single penny for each of our little UNICEF boxes...
Never had I been so relieved to be back in Mrs. Smith's station wagon, and on the radio was a song I'd never heard of, but it sounded like heaven to me at that moment. A cool, sweet, disco beat and strings, and horns, and a woman (who the DJ would inform me) called Jackie Stoudemire singing about an "invisible wind", pleading with the wind - and it may very well have been the wind that had been slapping up against our chilled ears all this miserable misty October late afternoon - to "blow him back". And I remember loving the feeling of hearing that song at that particular moment, how it felt exactly how I felt at that particular moment - not about a lost love, but certainly a feeling of wishing the wind might blow me back home so that I didn't have to knock on any more strangers' doors to ask for more pennies. I knew I loved the song the moment I heard it.
Except... it didn't really happen that way at all.
"Invisible Wind" is a disco classic, with its cool yearning melody - Stoudemire's vocal maturity defied her youth (she was barely out of school) and general inexperience - and with its elaborate and evocative string parts: it sounds like wind, you can almost see the way it whips around the song picking up stray words and feelings like so many crunchy autumn leaves and swirling them around like little tornados of sound and emotion. In its five minute 12" mix, the song is damn near perfect in construction, its breakdown in the middle is tight and exciting, and the song's relative brevity intensifies its inherent drama. The first time I heard it - just a couple weeks ago - I immediately felt cheated of the very specific childhood memories of this song I should have had. It's not WRKR's fault. The song had never been released.
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For the last five or so years, collectors of obscure R&B fossils have had a loyal friend and passionate ally (not to mention a favorite geeky professor) in the form of the Numero Group reissue label, whose Eccentric Soul series of compilations has illuminated some of the genre's darker (and in some cases, quite forbidden) alleys, highlighting the output of various independent labels (Chicago's magnificent Twinight, for instance, or Columbus, Ohio's Capsoul) or, as with their survey of Phoenix, Arizona's "Mighty" Mike Lenaburg, collecting the work of specific auteurs - an unsung army of might've-been Motowns, Gambles and Huffs that never quite made it out of the underground in the late 60s and 70s.
More recently, the Numero folks have also turned their increasingly Indiana Jones-ish missions to digging up and (quite literally) dusting off artifacts of disco and early hip-hop, releasing these unearthed treasures as (what else?) 12" singles - a project which has led to their exciting new series called Don't Stop, and the series' inaugural CD release, Recording Tap, which collects two tracks the Numero Group has already released as 12" singles - Jackie Stoudemire's musically glorious (if lyrically dubious) "Invisible Wind", and an early, raucous block party style rap track called "Rub a Dub Dub" by the Fabulous 3 MCs. As with the Eccentric Soul series, Don't Stop promises a series of passionately researched, beautifully packaged, and painstakingly mastered collections, with fascinating photos and notes that are usually equal parts VH-1 Behind the Music and E! True Hollywood Stories with a dash of Twilight Zone thrown in for good measure. But Recording Tap comes with an added bonus booklet which reproduces some of the actual handwritten lead sheets for the tracks on the CD, which, along with photographs of the actual tapes the CD's producers were working with, go a long way to humanizing the stories not just of the music's creation, but also of the challenges the Numero Group faced in releasing this music.
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To read the story behind the New York-based Tap label in the notes accompanying Recording Tap, it would almost seem that Numero have raised the obscurity bar so high that any future issues of Don't Stop will inevitably disappoint in that regard. The story revolves around Jeremiah Ben Yisrael (nee Teddy Thompson, not to be confused with the contemporary folk singer), a self-invented and re-invented (and re-invented) entrepreneur, who initially started the label in 1980 with money from his acting career (he'd played alongside Al Pacino and Roger Moore as bit part thugs, drug dealers and gangsters in the early 70s) and his flourishing chain of health food stores. Yisrael had long nursed musical ambitions, which first found fruit in an abortive apprenticeship to Gene Redd Jr., a former doo-wop singer-songwriter-producer who eventually became the manager for Kool & the Gang. It was Redd who encouraged Thompson to do a couple of recording sessions with an Off-Broadway singer named Bonnie Freeman (two of whose recordings appear here as bonus tracks) in 1971; but it was Redd's not quite "on-the-down-low" sexual proclivities that thwarted a deal the two might have made with Chess Records to release those recordings as a single. For the time being Redd and Thompson drifted apart.
By the decade's close, however, they were back in the studio together and the Tap label, which never truly got off the ground in any credible sense, was conceived. By then, Thompson had changed his name and started a storefront style "church" called the Temple of Issachar, based around his own idiosyncratic (some might say "harsh") interpretations of Torah. Through his church, Thompson - now Yisrael - would organize fashion shows to drum up interest in both Tap and the Temple to win converts to his teachings and discover (pardon the pun) untapped talent. And while he no doubt discovered that the promise of a recording contract could also be a powerful recruiting tool, the meticulously crafted music that he created with singers like Stoudemire and Arnie Love (who, together, dominate this collection both in quantity and quality) between 1980 and 1983 (when, following Gene Redd Jr.'s AIDS-related death, Yisrael gave up on the music industry for good, eventually drifting down to Florida) proved that the Tap label was neither a purely cynical fundraising enterprise - quite the contrary - nor was his music at all geared to religious proselytization.
The notoriously obsessive Yisrael took a perfectionist, money-is-no-object approach to his music, booking time at New York's priciest studios and hiring expensive producers and players (including, it is rumored, Barry White's Love Unlimited Orchestra) for his sessions. Nevertheless, his uncompromising paranoia concerning the marketing/distribution of his music virtually (tragically) guaranteed that none of these studio creations would ever see a proper release. (Indeed, if the epigram of the CD's notes is to be believed, Yisrael gave the Numero guys hell too!) All of which is painfully apparent in the 12 core tracks collected for Don't Stop: Recording Tap. Take for instance, "Invisible Wind", which appears here up in two different versions, Stoudemire's glorious straight-up disco take, and a harder-edged version with a Wilson Pickett-ish vocal by Arnie Love (backed by the Lovettes). It's heartbreaking to wonder what might have happened with the song if it had been given to a group like the Spinners, or if Stoudemire's version had ever seen the decent, well-distributed, well-promoted release it deserved at the time.
It's even more heartbreaking to listen to the rest of Recording Tap and find that if nothing else tops "Invisible Wind", there's plenty here (and plenty, according to the notes, still languishing on decaying reel-to-reels) to prove that song was no fluke. Stoudemire's "Guilty" has all the cool, understated dance floor glamour of Michael Jackson's "Rock With You", and "Breakout" by Arnie Love & the Lovettes is the kind of jittery R&B work-out, full of grunts and shouts and pleas and sassy background vocals, that makes me shuffle around the berber on our basement floor like a white boy James Brown - albeit a really sad, mutant, rhythmically pathetic white boy James Brown - with reckless disregard for whoever might see me. (I'm sure Fritz the Dachsund has been suffering nightmares about this.) The song is reprised in a garish, mostly instrumental version credited vaguely to Magnetism. "So Nice" is sung by young Annette Denvil with all the questionably pitched teenaged yearning you might hear on a girl group record from 1962, but the music is another story altogether, working the kind of modified reggae rock groove Sting would envy.
Yisrael's interest in the new "rap" music is also represented here by "Missy Missy Dee" by Missy Dee and the Melody Crew, and the Fabulous 3 MC's' "Rub a Dub Dub", both tracks recorded with the same personnel in a single afternoon session. They're both crude specimens of the form, even by the day's standards, but they both boast a boundlessly hopeful energy, and the former especially, has a fantastic backing track by a live band, with a hook built around the Tin Pan Alley chestnut "Ain't She Sweet". But together with the other tracks collected here, they demonstrate the breadth and the passionate forward-thinking of Jeremiah Ben Yisrael's vision. As mindboggling as Yisrael's sudden retreat from that vision is the fact that with the exception of Arnie Love (who would put out a handful of singles on various labels - most notably, a song called "I'm Out of Your Life" - under the name Arnie's Love following the still-birth of Tap), none of the artists represented here ever really saw the light of day. There are certainly moments that betray the outsiderness of Yisrael's art, the occasionally harsh recording of a vocal, the occasionally overbaked horn arrangement - but it's nevertheless easy to imagine an alternate reality in which these songs did get released and people are still grooving to them today, and Tap Records holds a place in the pantheon of pioneering independent labels of hip-hop, right next to Tommy Boy, Sugarhill, and Def Jam. Recording Tap isn't just a welcome archaeological document of that moment when disco gave way to hip-hop in New York; it's also a wonderful little back-to-the-future daydream, a thrilling collection of impossible childhood memories.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
Don't Stop: "Recording Tap"
The Numero Group
Released 3/4/2008
68 min.
SONGS:
"Breakout" by Arnie Love & the Lovettes
"Invisible Wind" by Jackie Stoudemire
"Missy Missy Dee" by Missy Dee & the Melody Crew
"We've Had Enough" by Arnie Love & the Lovettes
"Guilty" by Jackie Stoudemire
"So Nice" by Annette Denvil
"Rub A Dub Dub" by the Fabulous 3 MC's
"Don't Stop Dancin'" by Jackie Stoudemire
"Stop and Make Up Your Mind" by Arnie Love & the Lovettes
"Run Away Hide from Love" by Jackie Stoudemire
"Breakout" by Magnetism
"Invisible Wind" by Arnie Love & the Lovettes
"Does He Really Mean It" by Bonnie Freeman
"Love Which Way" by Bonnie Freeman
Recommended:
Yes
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Member: Paul Lorentz
Location: The Land of Limburger and Leinenkugel's
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