Get Down With It! The White Knight Of Soul 1959-72 - Wayne Cochran

Wayne Cochran is an obscure musician by any standards, and judged solely by the cover of this CD,  a musician with really, really scary hair. He does have a couple of (minor) claims to fame. For one, he wrote and performed the original version of the teen death drama "Last Kiss" (his version opens this CD).  He was also referenced in The Blues Brothers. But those are not the reasons that I bought a (somewhat expensive) CD of his and decided to review it here. The reason is that he is a phenomenal singer, definitely one of the 'blue eyes soul' voices of all time.

The songs are a mix of covers (some obvious choices, others not so much) and originals, with the originals mostly being written or co-written by Cochran. The majority of the material is uptempo, but there some nice ballads, such as "When My Baby Cries," complete with a soulful spoken section. Cochran must have recorded with a very talented horn section, as the horns are a highlight of many of his recordings, particularly on "Somebody's Been Cuttin' In On My Groove". It's a shame that Cochran never found a wide audience, at least this Raven Records CD does a great job of summing up his (mostly unknown) career.

And the man can DANCE! Check it out here. Pure James Brown footwork. Maybe a DVD of the man is needed.....

You can buy this CD here.

This CD is better than the cover may indicate.

"Summer Rain: The Essential Rivers 1964–1975" - Johnny Rivers

Surprisingly, there's a lot more to Johnny Rivers than "Secret Agent Man" and Chuck Berry covers. Some of his most interesting work was done in the late 1960's, when he helped popularize Jimmy Webb's songs and recorded quite a number of them. The album opens with "Memphis," his first hit and a Chuck Berry cover and continues with his good but not inspired covers of quite a number of what today we would call "Roots Rock" songs (all of them hits to varying degrees). Among those is also the campy but irresistible "Secret Agent Man," which was not a cover.

My favourite song on the album, and Johnny Rivers' only #1 hit, is the deeply soulful and moving "Poor Side Of Town". This song is interesting in a number of ways. For one thing, it is the only one of his Top Forty hits which he had a hand in writing (he co-wrote it with his produce Lou Adler). Secondly, it is Soul-oriented (with backing vocals, strings, etc.) and not Rock-oriented. Also, it makes you wonder why there aren't more songs like this on the album! As far as I know, Johnny Rivers did not record very many of his compositions, unfortunately. The followup to "Poor Side Of Town" was a Motown cover ("Baby I Need Your Lovin'") which isn't quite as strong as The Four Tops' original, but still has a charm of its own and became another sizable hit. After another Motown cover and hit ("The Tracks Of My Tears") we got to the strongest section of the album. A trio of strong Jimmy Webb songs are followed by equally well-written tracks such as the title track and "Look To Your Soul," all of them quite introspective. This leads up to an improbable cover that knocks me out every time I hear it, his somewhat Countryish take on Bob Dylan's "Positively Fourth Street". Bob Dylan has famously proclaimed that he prefers Rivers' version to his own. The final three songs on the album were all hit covers of hit songs and are all uniformly uninteresting.

So really there may not be enough primo material to make this album worth it. However I still enjoyed it and am glad to have the stronger tracks on album, especially since this material is not available on Itunes.