A while back I was directed to YouTube video of a commercial for some body spray or another where a dude puts on the body spray and turns into chocolate. I’m pretty sure I was shown the ad because somebody I know thought it was creepy and/or potentially offensive. I could see how it might be both. But more than that I was impressed by the song used in the spot.
I never thought the commercial in question would actually make it onto network television though and I quickly forgot it. So you might imagine how taken aback I was when it started popping up on the tube every few minutes not so long ago. Despite the ad’s weirdness I’m psyched every time it airs because it affords me the opportunity to hear a little bit of legendary New Orleans-based musician, composer, producer and performer Allen Toussaint’s “Sweet Touch of Love.”
“Sweet Touch of Love” is from Toussaint’s self-titled 1971 LP, which was also issued under the title From a Whisper to a Scream after one of the album’s standout tracks in some markets. While it may have been eponymously titled it wasn’t Toussaint’s debut album, as the then 16-year veteran (who tickled ivories for Fats Domino during the ’50s) of the New Orleans music scene had previously released The Wild Sound of New Orleans, an instrumental album, in 1958. In the interim he’d produced or written countless hits for numerous artists and been successfully covered by a host of popular acts. On Allen Toussaint the hitmaker covered two of his own popular compositions made famous by Lee Dorsey — “Working In the Coal Mine” and “Everything I Do Gohn Be Funky” — as well as a Vince Guaraldi tune and kicks out a handful of new vocal and instrumental tracks.
The music on Allen Toussaint is markedly different from both his groundbreaking R&B sides and the myth-making work he’d go on to release during the years he held stewardship over The Meters. It’s a bit too smooth and easy-going to be held up against the output of the masters of hard Funk but at the same time it exhibits better than many exactly what makes Funk music funky. A gumbo of dusty Country, backwater Blues, river-delta R&B, and Southern Soul, it illustrates how the down-home countrified influence on Rhythm & Blues and Soul is what really puts the low-down dirty stank on things that transforms the music into Funk.
“The Sweet Touch of Love,” with it’s honky-tonk piano, brass section and Gospel-y backup vocals is part Stax Records-esque Soul and part Southern-Rock, so it sounds like something The Band could’ve put out, but it’s inexplicably nasty too. “From a Whisper to a Scream” is a heartsick Blues-Funk cut that comes off like a more baroque Johnny “Guitar” Watson (whom, along with Billy Preston, Toussaint reminds me of vocally) thanks to a sophisticated arrangement replete with psychedelic vocal harmonies and a dizzy horn cadence that prefigures the famously sampled signature intro to Isaac Hayes‘ “A Few More Kisses to Go.” These two tunes, along with the sly examination of capitalist theory “What Is Success,” are my favorites of the album’s vocal numbers.
The instrumentals are on a whole pretty outstanding. The drums and piano intro of “Number Nine” — a joyous romp where a piano that sounds like Classical music being played in a juke joint, folky rhythm guitar and bluesy leads congeal over a propulsive drum-break — brings Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” to mind. “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” a Vince Guaraldi (of “Christmas Time is Here” fame) penned tune, gets a groovin’ Memphis-style reworking that splits the difference between Ramsey Lewis and Ike Turner’s respective brands of instrumental mood music. But my absolute favorite is the oft-sampled “Louie,” the kind of instrumental Blues/Funk tune that would’ve sounded at home on one of Willie Mitchell’s Hi Records 7′’s, and the only song on the disc that presages the raw, drum-driven funkstrumentalism of The Meters.
Being on an Allen Toussaint re-issue kick made me pull out one his lesser-known productions, the self-titled 1976 debut and only release from The Wild Tchoupitoulas, an Indian-costumed Mardi Gras parade group led by George Landry, the Neville brothers’ uncle. Steeped in the musical traditions of New Orleans, it oozes Funk, R&B, the party and parade music associated with Mardi Gras and the African rhythms that birthed Blues and Jazz (and by extension R&B, Funk and Rock ‘N Roll) and provided part of the DNA for all American popular music. And with lyrics that reflect the unique New Orleans parade culture and reinterpret traditional parade songs, delivered in a combination of call-n-response chants and African-influenced harmonizing that makes liberal use of Louisiana’s Creole dialect, it doesn’t really sound like anything else of it’s time or ours.
The music on the album is provided by The Meters, though it’s a departure from the straight-ahead jamming of their Josie classics, and additional vocal harmonies come courtesy of all the Neville brothers. In fact, making the Tchoupitoulas album inspired the brothers to form the all-family group that would become the era-enduring Neville Brothers band. Aside from providing the impetus for the Neville’s fraternal endeavors, the album, which really puts the Afro-Caribbean roots of native New Orleans’ Funk and R&B on display in a way that more mainstream Funk releases couldn’t, acts as a bridge between the New Orleans sound and it’s Jamaican descendant Reggae. The rowdy braggadocio (rife with tales of violence) and untranslatable slanguage of the Tchoupitoulas’ lyrics also provide an unexpected window into the Southern culture that would eventually proliferate amongst “Dirty South” rap artists.
Tunes like “Hey Pocky A-Way,” where they “rock dis funky joint” with a raggedy groove not unlike that of War’s “Slippin’ Into Darkness” or Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up,” the rattling stomp of “Hey Mama (Wild Tchoupitoulas)” with it’s swingin’ Jazz-Funk chorus parts, and the skanking “Meet the Boys On the Battlefront” are some of my favorites on the album. And though it may be a little “out there” when it comes to Funk albums given it’s dedication to a localized cultural phenomenon it’s riotous party music through and through.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise since we all know how much New Orleans likes a party. We all also know, the Crescent City has had it’s fair-share of reasons not to party over the last few years as well. And though it won’t wipe away the city’s hardships or fix any of the problems it still faces I hope uber-mainstream exposure of the kind Allen Toussaint is getting right now via the admittedly weird licensing of “Sweet Touch of Live” will encourage a few younger heads to rediscover the musical glory of NOLA’s past and it’s contributions to American popular music as we know it.
