{"id":5367,"date":"2012-12-19T12:45:40","date_gmt":"2012-12-19T18:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5367"},"modified":"2012-12-20T06:52:06","modified_gmt":"2012-12-20T12:52:07","slug":"the-things-men-without-women-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5367","title":{"rendered":"I Take The Punches I Can’t Slip, And I Give ‘Em Right Back"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was thirty years ago today that\u00a0Men Without Women<\/em>\u00a0by Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul was released.<\/p>\n

“What? By who and the whaaa?”<\/p>\n

Shaddap, siddown and listen.<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

If there was a place in America that was hermetically sealed against the influence of \u00a0rhythm and blues music, it was rural North Dakota in the seventies and eighties.<\/p>\n

Although that may have been a function of life in the Berg house. \u00a0I grew up playing classical music – my parents liked that – and then switched to whatever bits and pieces of Rock and Roll leaked through in late junior high. \u00a0 Of course, R&B at the time – the mid-seventies – had more than a whiff of the sort of excess that was off-putting, for purely trivial reasons; bands with a dozen people in lam\u00e9 suits and purple pimp-wear was a hard sell to a narrowly-focused Scandinavian kid. \u00a0See The Ohio Players, and get back to me.<\/p>\n

But bits and pieces leaked through. \u00a0Long about eleventh grade, I was working at KEYJ, and some shards of R&B leaked through to me; the gleeful-unto-overflowing soul of Smokey and the MIracles, the naked pain of Levi Stubbs and the Four Tops, and best of all, the raw, unbridled, hormones-with-sweat groove of the Stax\/Volt bands, especially my then and always favorites, Sam and Dave.<\/p>\n

And along about my freshman year of high school, I ran into Bruce Springsteen. \u00a0And if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you’ve read my writing about his music<\/a>, how his music impacted me<\/a> as someone who became a conservative, and the influence his band had on me<\/a> when it came to music.<\/p>\n

But in the days when only Al Gore had access to the internet, stuck in the middle of the prairie, it was hard to get news.<\/p>\n

——–<\/p>\n

And I’ve never been more bummed about the slowness of news to reach North Dakota than I was about this time 29 years ago. \u00a0In the summer of 1983, I was in Edinburgh, Scotland. \u00a0I was walking by a bar. \u00a0I saw a poster for a band, “Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul”. \u00a0I remembered the name, but kept walking; I didn’t know much.<\/p>\n

It was months later, early in my junior year of college, probably in October of 1983, that I read Jay Cox\u00a0–\u00a0<\/em>always one of the better music critics, in those days – doing his\u00a0“Ten Best Albums of 1982” piece, in the end-of-the-year edition of\u00a0Time\u00a0<\/em>Magazine.<\/p>\n

And #2 on the list was\u00a0Men Without Women<\/em>, by LIttle Steven and the Disciples of Soul – the first solo project by the erstwhile “Miami Steve” Van Zandt, Springsteen’s longtime second guitar player, recorded with a who’s who of obscure Jersey Shore and New York musicians. \u00a0Cox raved about the album – a collection of Stax\/Volt-style horn-driven soul with a hard, emotionally naked edge to it.<\/p>\n

It was months before I read the Cox review in Time. <\/em>The album couldn’t be found in Jamestown, of course. \u00a0I conjured up a reason for a road trip to visit friends at NDSU in Fargo, went to Mother’s Records…<\/p>\n

…and there it was.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I raced to Jamestown to find a turntable.<\/p>\n

And it’s hard to describe how hard the album smacked me.<\/p>\n

We’ll come back to that.<\/p>\n

———–<\/p>\n

Men Without Women\u00a0<\/em>was a throwback in many ways. \u00a0In musical style, it was horn-driven R&B, a genre that’d retreated to America’s self-styled roadhouses for years. Black R&B was ditching the horns for cheaper synths; white rock and roll (forget about synth-pop) was driven by the guitar.<\/p>\n

But the bigger throwback was the recording style. \u00a0In the fifties and sixties, most “Rhythm and Blues” and early Rock and Roll had been recorded by gathering the band around a few microphones connected to a tape deck, and playing until they got a cut they liked. \u00a0Listen to “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen; it was recorded on a single microphone, with the band gathered around; one of the reasons the vocals in the song are so famously inscrutable is that the singer was literally yelling over the band to be heard. \u00a0It was only a little more crude than the usual style of recording at the time.<\/p>\n

In the mid-sixties, the Beatles led the rush to multi-track recording;\u00a0Sergeant Pepper\u00a0<\/em>had been recorded using linked four-track tape decks, allowing musicians and engineers to layer many parts on top of each other. \u00a0By the late sixties and early seventies, eight-track decks at Motown allowed musicians to record, overdub remix, and partially-re-record tracks; recording engineering became an art form unto itself, and that only accelerated as 16, 24, 48 and 64 track studios became the technical\u00a0lingua franca\u00a0<\/em>of the music industry. \u00a0By the mid-seventies, the Rolling Stones were able to recordExile on Main Street\u00a0with Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman laying down tracks in the Caribbean, ship ’em to Keith Richard and Ron Wood for guitar tracks in London, and thence to Mick Jagger in New York for vocals.<\/p>\n

For\u00a0Men Without Women<\/em>, Van Zandt – who’d just left the E Street Band to try to establish a solo career – took a huge step back, stylistically and technologically. \u00a0Recording the old-fashioned way – capturing a live performance – was risky. \u00a0It depended on capturing a really, really good\u00a0<\/em>live performance. \u00a0For the MWOW <\/em>sessions, Van Zandt gathered the whole band around a couple of microphones (after a few rehearsals), and had them play the songs straight through; most of the cuts on\u00a0Men Without Women\u00a0<\/em>were done in one or two takes. \u00a0Van Zandt overdubbed a few guitar and wind tracks later – but it was a very sparing production job. \u00a0Most of what you hear was exactly as it came out on the floor of the studio.<\/p>\n

And it worked. \u00a0It was huge, raw, sloppy in places, and just a glorious collection of music.<\/p>\n

One of the reasons? \u00a0What a band.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Disciples featured a group of musicians that were household names among obscurantists and music wonks. \u00a0The horn section was borrowed from Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes – and is best known today for having been, mostly, the horn section from the Max Weinberg Seven, of the old Conan O’Brien show. \u00a0Bassist Jean Bouvoir, a black guy in a striking white mohawk, had just left the seminal shock-punk band The Plasmatics. \u00a0Drummer Dino Danelli was most famous as the drummer for The Young Rascals, a sixties-era “white soul” band; organ player Felix Cavaliere was also a former Rascal (and was only involved in the recording sessions, not the touring Disciples). \u00a0A few other players – percussionist Monte Ellison, and cameos from the Gary “U.S.” Bonds and the E Street Band’s Clarence Clemons, Roy Bittan, Max Weinberg and Danny Federici on a few cuts – rounded out the lineup for the big, beefy, breakneck recording sessions.<\/p>\n

The result? \u00a0Men Without Women\u00a0<\/em>was compared to the Rolling Stones’\u00a0Exile on Mainstreet<\/em> – both were raw, horn-driven, R&B drenched sets. \u00a0But while the Stones album exuded cynical dissipation, and sounded like a hangover set to a rave-up (and before you jump all over me – it’s my favorite Stones album),\u00a0MWOW\u00a0<\/em>was eagerly earnest, with a big, sincere heart right out on its leather sleeve.<\/p>\n

Videos below the jump.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The album opened with “Lyin’ in a Bed of Fire”, a raw, horn-and-guitar driven sprint that would have sounded at home on\u00a0Exile<\/em> – in this case with a later version of theDisciples:<\/p>\n