Heavy, of course, is relative. And I suppose, in a phrase, that’s the whole point of this damn editorial series. Too many of us, for too long, have willingly (or at least unthinkingly) participated in the parochial and highly defensive ghettoization of the artistic forms that we claim to love. This is metal, that is not, lose the flute and we’ll talk, and so forth. But heavy (or intense, or enrapturing, or meaningful, or what the shit have you) is just a word; a space to be occupied.
Today’s nomination for Reverse Polarity, then, is, as always, unerringly heavy. Heavy, as in the wild, deep, grooves of the wildest, deepest soul. Funk would get heavier, of course, and fusion and all the rest, but as far as something you might still write home to Mama and call ‘soul’, well, sir, Baby Huey & the Baby Sitters were a goddamn rock.
And to get the inevitable out of the way: heavy, too, in the sense that soul brother Baby Huey himself (né James Ramey) was a whole lotta Rosie. 350 pounds, easy, with some reports throwing out numbers nearer to 400. A big man, and near the end, probably at least one-quarter Afro.
Baby Huey & the Baby Sitters were a mainstay of Chicago’s high octane soul scene of the 1960s, and the band cut a handful of singles around the middle of the decade. Those singles, however, were much tamer than the album under consideration here, tending toward R&B-influenced garage rock rather than the seriously heavy (there it is again) and occasionally psychedelic soul/funk of Baby Huey’s one and only album, 1971’s posthumously released The Baby Huey Story: The Living Legend.
There are basically three reasons I think Baby Huey’s only album might tickle the ear of the hardened, ardent metalhead. First things first: his band could flat-out play; train off the rails, horns blowing in overdrive, a dervish of shouts and stomps and hands in the air. There’s a story – possibly apocryphal, but definitely within the realm of plausibility – about a time Baby Huey opened for James Brown with his rather minimal front line, three horns at the most. Still, his horn section was so goddamned electric that James Brown refused to go on after them, knowing that no matter how much of a sex machine he may have been, there was no way in hell his teeming horn section could match the redline intensity of those Baby Sitters.
Secondly, though deeply rooted in soul and funk (the sessions that made up the posthumous album were produced by Curtis Mayfield, and the band tackles – and frankly demolishes – three of Mayfield’s tunes), the album is a flowering of possibility. The album doesn’t just hop back and forth between crooning soul and hard-hitting funk grooves, but mashes those up with a messy, impatient glee, tipping its hat to the contemporary jazz fusion of Miles Davis, a touch of the Latin swoon of prime Santana, and flourishes of psychedelia. These traits all come together in the band’s psych/fusion take on Mayfield’s “Running,” and especially in the three instrumental workouts (and I mean workouts): “Mama Get Yourself Together,” “California Dreamin’,” and the flute and organ swirls of album closer “One Dragon Two Dragon.”
Still, the two highlights of the album are unquestionably Baby Huey’s take on Curtis Mayfield’s “Hard Times” (whose deep grooves and fluttering strings have since been sampled by a number of hip hop artists), and, above all else, the show-stopping, gut-wrenching, ten-minute barn-burning rendition of Sam Cooke’s monumental civil rights anthem “A Change is Gonna Come.” It’s this latter song that also provides the third point of contact between this raw soul platter and heavy metal: the vocal hit. My esteemed MetalReview colleague Doug Moore wrote a piece for Invisible Orangesa while back that explored the use of vocal hits in heavy metal – forceful, typically wordless vocal exclamations that are used to punctuate a song. Some of the more famous include Tom G. Warrior’s “UGH!” and Abbath’s “BLECH!,” though Doug’s article does an impressive inventory (continued in the voluminous chain of comments that follows).Though it appears here and there throughout the record, “A Change is Gonna Come” is a showcase for Baby Huey’s vocal hit – a rawer than raw, soul-drenched, reverbed, and, if we’re being honest, drug-addled screech. Crank up the volume at just before the 2:00 mark and get your ass blown away.
As important as Sam Cooke’s original version of this song is (particularly given Cooke’s own tragic – and mysterious – death before the single was released in 1964), Baby Huey’s is charged with a whole different sort of fire. Cooke wrote the song in 1963, at a time when it was still an indictment of racial injustice, but had an overweening sentiment of fervent hopefulness. By the time Baby Huey recorded this rambling, overheated version seven years later, Dr. King was dead, and cities around the world had burned in 1968 and its aftermath. Singing about that change gonna come in 1970 was more like a pipe dream, a desperate wish that looked maybe less likely than ever, even in the face of advancing civil rights legislation. Remember that these years that incubated Baby Huey from a dancehall crooner to a mystical giant of a heroin-addicted primal screamer are the same ones that turned Marvin Gaye from hearing it through the grapevine to wondering just what in the earthly hell was going on.
James Ramey died in a motel in Chicago of a heart attack brought on by heavy drug abuse in 1970, barely aged 26. His only album document was released later in 1971, to little initial acclaim. The intervening years have given that album a small but devoted fan base, but its renown is still far too little for this big man with his hell of a band.
