South Dallas All Stars
Live at the South Dallas Pop Festival, 1970 (Now-Again) Few Texans are aware of the vibrant funk scene that sprang up here in the late Sixties wake of James Brown. If not for the tenacity of funk enthusiasts like producer Eothen “Egon” Alapatt, nut-tight troupes like the Apollo Commanders, the Soul Seven, and the Marchel Ivery Quintet might be lost to history. Live at the South Dallas Pop Festival captures one rainy Monday night in June 1970 at the Central Forest Club, a former theatre just south of downtown Dallas. Several Big D musicians, among them future KKDA-AM deejay and Metroplex jazz staple Roger Boykin, put this festival together and hired an engineer to record it on two-track quarter-inch tape. Thirty-four years later, the sonic result could accurately be described as “garage funk,” but that shouldn’t be taken as a knock on the chops. The electrified, jazz-leaning funk of the Marchel Ivery Quintet, for whom Boykin served as musical director, and the psychedelic-tinged show band vamps of the Apollo Commanders indicate the kind of prowess that only comes from doing it to death night after night. Although the album comes without song titles, the mostly-instrumental original numbers are supplemented with credible covers like the Soul Seven’s take on James Brown’s “Brother Rapp” and the Apollo Commanders’ version of the Impressions’ “Choice of Colors.” If this is what South Dallas sounded like on a Monday night, Fridays must’ve been super-duper throw-downs.
This article appears in January 30 • 2004.