Gwen McCrae - my favorite of the two formidable Gwens in soul and funk.
She had two great phases and a pretty nice moment in the middle.
A titanic performance in the soul blasting Sixties-style (although actually released at the start of the '70s).
Jump ahead a decade to this postdisco / boogiefunk club classic
And this one, more straightforwardly uplifting, fantastic too.
Stubbs the Deejay had them but instead of just taping off him as I mostly did with the import 12-inches, for a series of cassettes I played endlessly, these were tunes I picked up myself on vinyl.
A much later MAW remix
Some fan's superextended mix
And then the pretty nice middle phase? That was when she was married to George McCrae and did some things similar to his smash "Rock Your Baby"
Right down to having "rock" in the title
I actually interviewed Gwen McCrae - this must have been around 1988.
She was warm, vivacious, everything you'd expect.
This was in London - presumably she was over promoting this single she had out on Rhythm King, since there seems to be no album around that time that she did.
3 comments:
Here's another of Gwen's that got a lot of pirate airplay/club play in London in the 80s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJHMAGm7uC4
A copy of that Lost Soul Vol.2 has just been donated to the Oxfam where I volunteer, rather amazingly (bearing in mind the kind of stuff we usually get). Think I'll buy it myself!
I first heard Gwen McCrae on the second of Morgan Khan's Street Sounds LPs, released in the UK late '82 IIRC. In fact, she got star billing, if the back cover is anything to go by:
https://www.streetsounds.co.uk/main2.html
Also on this record is Paul Hardcastle (under discussion elsewhere) in his First Light guise.
The Street Sounds LPs are a good way to track the progress of R&B in the early/mid 80s (or at least how it was consumed in the UK). The "R&B bad music years" (ie 85-86-87) seem largely coterminous with the wider rot , a moribund period when the revitalising effects of hip hop/house/Soul II Soul hadn't kicked in (although when R&B did first try & integrate hip hop - ie New Jack Swing - the results weren't great).
Well you had the Jam & Lewis stuff - "Saturday Love" is fantastic. SOS Band. And weren't those years also when Loose Ends did "Hangin' On A String"?
My sense with R&B is that it really doesn't have off years - there's a steady pump of quality and a kind of incremental evolution. The producers are usually among the first to get to grips with the latest technology. I mean, there are golden ages that are a big more golden than the general steady pump of it - like the whole post-Sly socially conscious, cinematically produced era of soul with "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone" and "For the Love of Money" and so forth, that was a long peak phase.
I have a bunch of the Street Sounds electro and hip hop LPs but yes it would be handy to have their lines of releases in other genres. Amazing story, Morgan Khan - at one point he had a magazine as part of his empire.
You should definitely get that Lost Soul Vol. 2. The first three are full of gems.
Post a Comment