|
Discography | Personnel
| Photos
Way back in 1969, at a small historically black
school called Bishop College in Dallas, Texas, an Assistant
Band Director had an idea for six students he led in the school's
Ambassador Marching Band – why not record two of the
hardest-hitting funk songs of all time? Wendell Sneed, a jazz
drummer par excellence who caught the funk bug around 1967
from soon-to-be bandmate Mike McKinney, assembled The Soul
Seven from a multi-talented bunch attending Bishop on music
scholarships. With the help of old friend Roger Boykin, another
Bishop alumnus (1963), Sneed released his project on the fledgling
Soultex label. “At the time the record came out, I was
playing straight ahead jazz with musicians like Marchel Ivery,
James Clay, David “Fathead” Newman,” Boykin
recalls. “Before I went off to the army in 1965, Wendell
and I played jazz together. But by 1967 he was all the way
off into funk. James Brown was happening! I don’t have
to tell you about James Brown’s influence. Wendell was
one of those he influenced.”
“I was already listening to James Brown,
‘cause he had two of the baddest drummers in history,”
Sneed replies. “If you were a drummer of any kind, you
had to play some James Brown somewhere. I was messing around
with Clyde (Stubblefield) and Jab’o (Starks). I heard
some things they were doing that influenced my style of playing.”
Indeed, JB’s orchestra influenced the entire band -
in both style and intensity. Their not-meant-for-the-weak-of-heart
plug side, “Mr. Chicken ----”, burns away with
discordant, marching band-style horns paving the way for bluesy
guitar solos that dig deep into the heart of Texas. The B-side
settles into a mid tempo groove and struts flamboyantly from
start to finish, effectively proving that the Seven could
flip the funk-hits of the day. “We’d gotten into
The Meters. “The Cissy’s Thang” was our
take on “Cissy Strut.” You start researching Jab’o
and Clyde, inevitably you wind up with Zigaboo Modelieste.
We tried to find stuff to cover that no other band was doing.
The other bands weren’t doing James Brown or The Meters
with authenticity.”
Or The Markeys for that matter. A third song
from the session – a heavy duty cover of the Stax/Volt
stalwarts’ “Grab That Thang” retitled “Southside
Funk” – didn’t find a release until 2001,
as Now Again Records’ parent company Stones Throw seven
inch and as part of The Funky 16 Corners compilation. “We
would take someone’s song and put our own twist to it,”
trombonist and on-stage leader Charles Hunt remembers. Distilling
the Soul Seven experience into one sentence, he adds, “We
wanted to put out the funkiest music possible and hopefully
get some gigs.”
While The Soul Seven certainly achieved Hunt’s
goal, their live performances were often recorded –
if at all – using one microphone, with a 1/4”
reel to reel moving at the slowest speed possible. Thankfully
Boykin and Sneed booked The Seven at their independently financed
and produced South Dallas Pop Festival on the evening of June,
22nd 1970, and hired a professional recording engineer to
document the night’s proceedings. Alongside friendly
rivals The Apollo Commanders and The Black Maffia, The Soul
Seven revue turned out an intense set that highlighted guests
Eddie Purrell, Monica Harris and The Voices of Time and Mama
Dee… and of course found the band doing what they did
best – rocking the show with heavy, heavy funk. The
short selection presented here is but a small portion of their
performance at the Pop Festival, and is only a slight indication
of the Seven’s frightful ability to tear apart funk
and soul hits of the day. Other live reels have recently surfaced,
showcasing The Soul Seven covering The Markeys’ “Honey
Pot” alongside James Brown’s “Cold Sweat”
and “Mother Popcorn” and the band’s original
compositions. Lamentably, the recording quality on these reels
is barely beyond recognizable.
The final bit of The Soul Seven’s recorded
history is an oddity released on Dallas entrepreneur Pat Morgan’s
Pompeii label and credited to Ike Turner and the Soul Seven
– “Everythings-Everything.” “In 1970,
Wendell and myself were hired as A&Rs for Pompeii,”
Boykin recalls. “Wayne Money, who was a kind of VP at
the time, brought us in. Pat didn’t know much about
soul, and Wayne, myself and Wendell were friends. He was in
the Bishop school band when The Soul Seven were there.”
Possibly because of this association, The Soul Seven were
hired to overdub horns on an Ike Turner instrumental that
Morgan purchased for Pompeii’s fledgling catalog –
“Everythings-Everything,” with catalog number
P-7001, appears to have been the first seven inch released
on the label. Unfortunately, the remaining members of The
Soul Seven remember little of the session that birthed the
group’s ultimate release. “I was married in those
days, and there ain’t no telling what my wife had me
doing,” Boykin laughs. “But one thing’s
for sure – I wasn’t going out as much as I had
previously.” Hunt didn’t even know that the overdubs
he and the band arranged were for an Ike Turner track. “I
remember Larry Blake shouting “Everything’s everything!”
before we started our gigs,” Hunt offers. “But
as to that record, I don’t know anything about it.”
Egon
|
