20 Lost Funk Gems

Let’s get funky. There are lots of great “lost” funk albums out there. Here are ten, a dozen, 15, 20 of my favorites:

Rasputin’s Stash | Rasputin’s Stash – Little-known but widely sampled, this Chicago-based group released its self-titled debut in 1971 before encountering a series of bad breaks that ensured they would only release two albums total. Shortly after dropping Rasputin’s Stash, four of the group’s eight members left the band, and then their record label folded. Coulda, shoulda, woulda been a hit, but it’s still totally funky.

Listen: Mr. Cool

Mutiny | Mutiny On The Mamaship – Jerome “Bigfoot” Brailey was a drummer with Parliament and Funkadelic, until leaving those groups after a dustup over salary. His next group, Mutiny, plumbed the P-Funk sound, with a healthy dose of righteous anger, playful mockery, and pure funk. Their 1978 album Mutiny On The Mamaship is almost the equal of any of the P-Funk bombs…

Listen: Lump

Magnum | Fully Loaded – Nothing subtle here. This group of LA teenagers banged out nasty, sub-Funkadelic guitar grooves while calling for revolution, comparing guns to orgasms, and yearning for warm wet nipples. A must-have for those who like their funk gritty and guitar-heavy…

Listen: Evolution

Various Artists | Nigeria Disco Funk Special: The Sound Of The Underground Lagos Dancefloor 1974-1979 – North America wasn’t the only continent getting down in the 70s, as this compilation amply proves. Nigeria was awash in funky grooves during that decade, and they weren’t all coming from Fela Kuti. The Sahara All-Stars, Bongos Ikwue & The Groovies, and T-Fire are but three of the nine forgotten funkateers captured here.

Listen: Take Your Soul [The Sahara All-Stars]

Sugarman 3 | Pure Cane Sugar – Funk lives! Released in 2002, this is the newest music on this list by a couple of decades, but you wouldn’t know by listening – Pure Cane Sugar is raw funk by the pound, and sounds like dusty vintage stuff. This New York City four-piece combo (don’t let the name fool you) has the chops to fit in seamlessly with the other bands mentioned here…

Listen: Funky So-And-So

B.T. Express | Non-Stop – This Brooklyn band is perhaps best known for their 1974 smash, ‘Do It (‘Til You’re Satisfied)’, but they’re hardly a household name when it comes to funk. Their 1975 sophomore album, Non-Stop, is a fine example of the state of funk at that time, blending hard funk with the occasional clutch of strings. Forgive the eminently forgettable cover of The Carpenters’ ‘Close To You’, and this one holds up well…

Listen: Peace Pipe

Betty Davis | Betty Davis – While Miles Davis was dabbling in jazz/funk fusion in the early 70s, his wife Betty was busy putting out some of the nastiest funk to be found anywhere. Featuring a star-studded band that includes drummer Gregg Errico and bassist Larry Graham of Sly & The Family Stone fame, as well as guitarist Neil Schon and keyboardist Merl Saunders, Betty Davis is high quality, super sexy funk.

Listen: If I’m In Luck I Might Get Picked Up

Swamp Dogg | Total Destruction To Your Mind – During the 1970s, Jerry Williams Jr was the kookiest funk artist this side of George Clinton. He wrote songs that were grabbed from the headlines of the day, he wrote songs that were out of this world, and he wrote good old fashioned love songs. But everything he wrote was funky, and wonderfully off-kilter. Fittingly, his gloriously subversive albums remain stubbornly out of print…

Listen: Total Destruction To Your Mind

Osibisa | Superfly T.N.T. Soundtrack – This won’t make anyone forget Curtis Mayfield’s brilliant soundtrack to the original Superfly, but that’s a standard few albums could meet. Instead, Osibisa’s free-flowing Caribbean grooves make for an excellent companion piece to Mayfield’s masterpiece. This is blaxploitation with a hint of brotherhood…

Listen: Superfly Man

The Upstroke | Porno Groove: The Sound Of 70′s Adult Films – This 2009 album compiles some of the best music from a batch of vintage porn films. Fantasy (not to be confused with Fanstasy Records) was behind many adult titles in the 70s, including Honeydew, Insatiable, and Ride Me Like A Wave. When the company’s founder passed away in 1985, its intellectual property became tied up in the legal system. In 2008, a huge collection of soundtrack material from those films was unearthed, and the best of that stash is featured here…

Listen: Greatful Head [from Jayne's Woodstock Adventure]

Ripple | Ripple – Both sides of this 1973 LP start off like disco-lite, including the album-opening minor hit ‘You Were Right On Time’, before building up to furious funk jams that redeem this album’s place on this list. Ripple sounds like a self-contained history of the musical transition from funk to disco…

Listen: Get Off

Eddie Palmieri | Harlem River Drive – The title track is a groovy spin through a muggy New York City. Pianist Palmieri formed his first band at age 14 in 1950, and has been going strong ever since. This 1971 album is his funkiest, and a good stand in for all the funky Fania and boogaloo albums of the 70s, by the likes of Joe Cuba, Ray Barretto and Willie Colon…

Listen: Harlem River Drive [Theme Song]

Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson | From South Africa To South Carolina – It might have a message, but it’s still pretty damn funky.

Listen: Johannesburg

Exit 9 | Straight Up – Exit 9 was a super tight, nine piece funk band that (like many artists on this list) made the occasional foray into soul. Straight Up hits like the work of a harder-edged version of Earth Wind & Fire, and while it’s understandable why this group didn’t achieve superstar status, they deserve better than total obscurity…

Listen: Jive Man

Black Nasty | Talking To The People – Like Funkadelic, Black Nasty was a Detroit-based funk group that featured rock-styled guitar and soulful organ. They’ve been billed as the heaviest band on Stax Records, but their lone album, 1973′s Talking To The People, is several measures more soulful than any of Funkadelic’s early stuff, and reflects the soul-weariness of the early 70s… [read full review]

Listen: Talking To The People

Larry Williams & Johnny Watson | Two For The Price Of One – It’s hard to say where the “urban soul” of the late 60s ends and the raw funk of the early 70s begins, but Larry Williams and Johnny Watson’s 1967 album Two For The Price Of One is probably one milepost in that transition. Williams’ gruff vocals make harmless lines like “Sock it to me!” sound like a pointed invitation, while Watson kicks out the funky jams.

Listen: Two For The Price Of One

Eugene McDaniels | Headless Heroes Of The Apocalypse – Jerry Wexler called him “the black Bob Dylan” and the left rev. Eugene McDaniels played with jazz musicians, but Headless Heroes Of The Apocalypse plays like a smoldering, righteous black power funk album. McDaniels was known as a hit-making songwriter for Les McCann & Eddie Harris (‘Compared To What’) and Roberta Flack (‘Feel Like Making Love’) before taking this solo turn. Its final track equated white people with a parasite in America, and earned Ahmet Ertegun a call from Nixon’s White House, which got McDaniels canned from Atlantic Records.

Listen: The Lord Is Back

Mother’s Finest | Another Mother Further – This is the only opener that blew P-Funk off its own stage. According to P-Funk bassist Cardell “Boogie” Mosson, “You had bands that wanted to kick our ass, but I’d say Mother’s Finest is about the one. We’d done a couple of concerts with them, and, you know, we wasn’t stroking on that funk, and they tightened that ass.” It’s easy to see how — this is big, stadium-ready funk with huge guitar hooks and singalong choruses.

Listen: Mickey’s Monkey

Exuma | Reincarnation – The artist born Macfarlane Gregory Anthony Mackey was born in the Bahamas, and it shows in his music. Reincarnation is more chameleon than album, shifting colors with every track. Exuma alternately sounds like a Bahamian Cat Stevens, a fired-up Taj Mahal, a raving voodoo witch doctor, and Richie Havens at Woodstock. And if you can’t get behind that combination, I’ve got a couple of George Winston albums for you…

Listen: Exuma, The Obeah Man [not from Reincarnation]

Various Artists | Car Wash Soundrack – This one sold a ton, but because of its title track, nobody thinks of it as a bumping funk album. It’s got some soul, some disco, and some Richard Pryor – a nice blend of 70s sounds, but it’s definitely funky… [read full review]

Listen: 6 O’Clock DJ (Let’s Rock)

*****

Also funky…

Mandrill | Composite Truth
Cymande | Cymande
The Pharoahs | In The Basement
Bo Diddley | Where It All Began
Syl Johnson | Complete Mythology
Black Sugar | Black Sugar
John Lee Hooker | Free Beer And Chicken
Various Artists | The Funky 16 Corners
Budos Band | Budos Band II
Various Artists | Bay Area Funk

Doubleshot Tuesday: Outta Season/Koo Koo

[Today: Shocking...]

It’s difficult to imagine the shitstorm of controversy that would greet the release of an album cover like Ike & Tina Turner’s Outta Season if it dropped today. That visual of Ike in white face, about to bite into a big red slice of watermelon would undoubtedly be banned by WalMart and all the big box chains, while inspiring hand-wringing editorials in several major newspapers. Consequently, most modern artists are PR-savvy enough to shy away from controversial imagery, which is kind of a shame. I can’t say I love this cover art, but it sure demands your attention. It’s been suggested that this was Ike and Tina’s (she eats her watermelon on the back of this gatefold) comment on a world full of white musicians who were busy ripping off black music. But when I look at it I see a visual representation of just how ridiculous stereotypes really are. Ike Turner has become a bit of a stereotype himself over the last few decades – he’s either a wife-beating madman or the inventor of rock and roll, depending on which circles you’re hanging out in.

Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry’s 1981 solo debut album Koo Koo came in a rather eye-catching sleeve. It features a photograph of Harry, which was then painted over by the artist H.R. Giger, who added the metal skewers through her face. Giger is perhaps best known for his Academy Award-winning design work on the movie Alien, and has also created album art for bands such as Emerson Lake & Palmer (Brain Salad Surgery) and Dead Kennedys (Frankenchrist). His work is an eerie combination of machinery and the human body that has been labeled biomechanical art. “I try to come close to my imagination,” he told Shadowplay magazine in 1985, “I have something in my head and I try to work it out — like a kind of exorcism… I think most of the images in my paintings are evil, but you can’t say that I’m evil. It’s just that evil is much, much more interesting than paradise.”

Magic Moment: Funkadelic In NYC

They’re doing the Cosmic Slop. It isn’t live (like the video title claims), but this clip from 1973 is awesome proof of just how freaky Funkadelic was back in the day…

Buried Treasure: Talking To The People

[Today: Down in the street...]

By the early 70s, the hopes raised by the Civil Rights movement had congealed into a grim understanding that if the laws had changed, the economic and social reality for blacks was about the same as it ever was. This understanding was reflected in the music of Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and George Clinton’s band Funkadelic. Like Funkadelic, Black Nasty was a Detroit-based funk group that featured rock-styled guitar and soulful organ. They’ve been billed as the heaviest band on Stax Records, but their lone album, 1973′s Talking To The People, is several measures more soulful than any of Funkadelic’s early stuff.

Sly Stone sang about a family affair, but Black Nasty actually was a family affair. R&B singer and producer Johnnie Mae Matthews was known as the ‘Godmother Of Detroit Soul’ because she was the first African-American female to own and operate her own label, and helped influence the careers of many legendary soul artists, including David Ruffin and Betty LaVette. With her encouragement and professional support, her son, Artwell ‘Art’ Matthews, and his first cousin Mark Patterson became the drum and bass backbone of several well-named bands. Their first group was a rock-oriented outfit called Raw Integrated Funk that featured a young Ted Nugent on guitar. Raw Integrated Funk would go through several lineup changes before becoming Black Nasty, which had Jackie Cosper on guitar, Audrey (sister of Art) Matthews and Terry Ellis trading lead vocals, and Thomas Carter on keyboards.

Like the artists mentioned above, Black Nasty made music that reflected the soul-weariness of the early 70s. The super-funky, album opening title-track is nothing less than a primer on how to separate the real soul brothers from the whack attack: “He that knows and know he knows, follow him/He that don’t know but want to know, lend him a hand/He that don’t know but think he knows, look out/He that don’t know but don’t want to know, look out.” The song also touches on drug abuse and is an unlikely marriage of black militancy and get-to-know-your-neighbor esprit. ‘Nasty Soul’ has enough mouth-popping, heavy-breathing, nasty ass vocalizing to make it sound like a clone of Dr. Funkenstein, while ‘Black Nasty Boogie’ features uptempo boogie-woogie-style piano and the invitation to “Shake, shake your jelly.”

But if Talking To The People is funky and silly in places, it also carries some emotional weight. In 1973, America was mired in a hopeless war, bogged down by political scandal, and hampered by inflation. The ghettos in many cities had been burned out by the turmoil of the late-60s, and like the psyche of Black America, were still scarred and in need of repair. Bands like Black Nasty said it’s okay to get down, as long as you know what’s up…

Listen: Talking To The People

Listen: Nasty Soul

Listen: Getting Funky Round Here