This review made an impression when I read it in the Christmas 1983 issue of NME. The concept of this page "The Ghost of Live Past" is reviews not of concerts from the preceding week but from years ago - writers revisiting gigs that had a profound impact on them.
In this case, NME legend Charles Shaar Murray remembers a 1975 concert by Ohio Players he saw in Detroit. The first part of it is simply a well-observed live review (I should imagine that unless he has phenomenal powers of recall, CSM had been there to do a feature on the band and consequently had some old notes that he could draw on).
Where it gets interesting is when he gets into meta-talk about how black music works for its audience - an Ohio Players performance as the performing of a community service, the sound and the stage show communicating with the band's primary fans on a vibrational level that necessarily bypasses even the most informed and sensitive white listener.
Earlier in the 1970s, CSM did a round-up review of a bunch of soul and R&B records, criticizing some (Isaac Hayes for instance) in a fairly standard for the time white rock critic way: too slick, too over-produced / too over-arranged, too close to showbiz. As a fan of blues (later to write books about John Lee Hooker and Jimi Hendrix), he would have had that preference for the gritty, the raw, the raspy - and an antipathy for the mellifluous and the polished. Here, though, just a few years later, he grasps the power of slickness and tightness, the sheer commitment to entertainment manifested by Ohio Players.
There's a phrase in this review - "their murderous and militant elegance" - that I assimilated so deeply I must have come to believe I'd thought it up all by myself, reusing it sometimes almost word for word and other times in adapted form (e.g. "lethal panache") many times over the years.
A few years later, I would have a similar revelatory experience to Charlie Murray's when I went to review Zapp for Melody Maker. A show so militantly - no, militarily - tight and professional I went to see the band perform it again at the same venue the very next night.
This was a one-off feature that also included Fred Dellar recalling John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy sharing a stage in Kilburn, right? It also made a big impression on me: not just about the music itself but also regarding what I perceived (as a 16 year old) to be the huge chasm of time that had elapsed since the year of the Coltrane gig (1960?) and the date of issue - and that Fred was still hip enough to write for the NME nearly a quarter of a century later! I also remember John Peel playing the OPs around this time: unusual. And I'm also reminded of a quip that I think you made some while ago Simon re: the proliferation of boutique labels focussed on private press/minor label/otherwise unreleased stuff and what that means for listening: you can know all about "independent music from north-east Ohio 1971-1974" but never have heard of the Ohio Players! Great last paragraph from CSM. I saw a documentary about Teddy Pendergrass a few years ago, and I thought that while on the surface it's all about a universal message of lurrrve, underneath there's a robust message about keeping it together in the post-civil rights era (i.e. analogous with what Audre Lorde had to say about self-care).
ReplyDeleteDon't remember the other two reviews, I'll have to dig them out.
ReplyDeleteThink I must have read the Ohio Players because I had a couple of their singles and even one of those albums with the steamy covers - I'd been buying up a lot old disco and funk records second-hand in the early '80s.
Seem to remember the Ohio Players album was not all skin-tight funk like I'd have preferred, but had some perplexing fusion-y moments - rather like this pretty out-there track on Kool & the Gang's Light of the World - https://youtu.be/FQ7raoDXtrg?si=DA497pA_B_montlx
That’s a great piece. My somewhat similar life-changing experience of seeing a live funk band was Cameo on the Word Up tour. The core group was down to a three piece, but on tour they still had a big live band, and it felt like there were about a dozen people on stage. And like Zapp and the OPs, they were jaw-droppingly tight. Digging deep into the back catalogue - Word Up was something like their 12th album! - doesn’t reveal a lot of neglected gems. But the impact of that show will stay with me forever.
ReplyDeleteAnd that was just a UK gig at a provincial theatre. As CSM says, a show in the US would have been something else again.