Men Without Women

YouTube has justified its existence.

I have three favorite albums of the rock and roll era; Springsteen's Darkness On The Edge Of Town, The Who's Who's Next...

...and one you've never heard of; Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul's Men Without Women.

Oh, you probably know "Little Steven" - a nom de plume of "Miami" Steve Van Zandt, AKA Silvio Dante of The Sopranos, and the host of "Little Steven's Underground Garage, which is just about the only listenable music radio out there.

Van Zandt left the E Street Band in 1982 to kick off a solo career - and he kicked it off in style with his debut album, "Men Without Women". An homage to Stax/Volt soul, it made Time Magazine's ten best albums of 1982 (back when Jay Cox was Time's rock critic - hence, they weren't a complete joke). Raw, unrestrained, impassioned - one of the just-plain-best albums ever made.

The album was recorded in one day by gathering the band around in a big circle in the studio. And what a band; former Young Rascals Dino Danelli on drums and Felix Cavaliere on keys, Plasmatic Jean Bouvoir (the black guy in the white mohawk) on bass, and the horn section from the Asbury Jukes (now largely absorbed by the Max Weinberg 7, with E-Streeters Weinberg, Danny Federici, Gary Tallent and Roy Bittan helping out on drums, organ, bass and keys in the studio, and guest shots from Clarence Clemons, J.T. Bowen and Gary "U.S." Bonds on backing vocals.

The money Van Zandt saved on recording, he spent on...well, not a video. A full-length feature movie. He shot tons of footage - with no script. He soon realized that he had tons of footage - but no plot, no story, really no movie. He's stated he'd never ever release this movie, which has been something of a legend among the album's tiny coterie of fans.

And for the past 24 years, there's been a rumor - that there was one video released for the album, for one of the album's most wonderful cuts, "Forever", a song that made it to #40 on the Billboard Top 40, and stayed there for a week. And in a quarter century, I've never seen it.

Until Youtube.

Warning; the transfer is really bad. The whole thing is recorded fast, so the pitch is higher than on the original, and the video warbles in spots, taking the pitch up and down in wide swoops. The transfer is so bad, you can't tell if all the herky-jerky stops and starts are technical difficulties or that irritating early-eighties stop-action thing they did it vids (see Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend").

But it's "Forever", so who cares?

As a bonus, I found a better-quality vid of Van Zandt doing the gospel-tinged "'Til The Good Is Gone" with his old band, the Jukes, sharing vocals with Southside Johnny.

There was, of course, bad news; Van Zandt really only had one good album in him. The follow-up, Voice of America was a big disappointment, trading the Stax/Volt R'nB in for really dreary, overproduced garage-rock (you think it's an oxymoron? You're right!), and the raw passion about the trials of everyday life with screeds about Reagan and Thatcher and the Argentine Junta. The next three - Freedom No Compromise, Revolution and Born Again Savage, were worse, delving into poorly-done worldbeat and dance music but keeping the screeching lefty politics.

But for one glorious moment...

I have to get Men Without Women on CD.

Posted by Mitch at September 27, 2006 05:46 AM | TrackBack