Wilson Pickett
Funky Midnight Mover: The Atlantic Studio Recordings (1962-1978) (Rhino Handmade)Alabama-born and shipped to Detroit in his troubled teens, Wilson Pickett (1941-2006) hollered biodiesel R&B from heaven to hell. Taking a page out of Hip-O Select’s magnificent Complete Motown Singles series, the 6-CD Funky Midnight Mover employs expert annotator Bill Dahl to biograph each track (154), rocks a box-set-worthy sessionography, and digs art straight from the Atlantic vaults into a linen-bound singles-style book. True grit as leathery as Otis Redding and the Four Tops’ Levi Stubbs, whose brother Joe Stubbs vacated the vocalist spot Pickett filled in the Falcons, rages for eight straight hours. Pickett actually tones down to Motown on his first post-Falcons solo single, 1963’s “My Heart Belongs to You,” boasting song choreography like a Smokey Robinson track for the Temptations, while its plaintive flipside, “Let Me Be Your Boy,” evokes a Four Tops clapper. Nine selections go that initial twofer one better by employing Motown’s house band, including pianist Joe Hunter, bassist James Jamerson, and drummer Benny Benjamin. Disc one then transitions into the singer’s first Atlantic sides, which finally unleash Wicked Pickett the moment Atlantic head Jerry Wexler and Stax owner Jim Stewart arrive at Stax Studios in Memphis to produce “In the Midnight Hour,” a horned thrust of lust. Its rewrite “Danger Zone” sputters, but “634-5789 (Soulsville, U.S.A.)” and “Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won’t Do)” begin the hall of fame run that wastes no time in opening disc two with “Land of 1000 Dances.” So goes the avalanche. The Wicked Pickett, 1967, fares tougher at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, kicking Crescent City (“New Orleans,” “Ooh Poo Pah Doo,” “Time Is on My Side”) and hitting with “Mustang Sally.” Genius Atlantic producer Tom Dowd (Eric Clapton, Allman Brothers) appears by the third disc to help Pickett manhandle Sam Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me,” “Stagger Lee,” and “A Man and a Half,” and CD four mines covers of the day, 1969-1972, both good (“Hey Joe”) and hallucinogenic (“Sugar Sugar,” “Run Joey Run”), the latter part of nine additional cuts from Wilson Pickett in Philadelphia – produced by Philly soul wizards Gamble & Huff – punching up as righteous as James Brown fronting the psychedelic Temptations. By the twilight of his Atlantic tenure, disc five, songs and arrangements have run out – unlike Pickett’s understatement on the Don Robey ballad “Pledging My Love” – and the late-1970s disco at the end (Tony Joe White’s “Hold on to Your Hiney”) bottoms out. The final ticket, rarities and outtakes, sizzles like Pickett and his funky brother Wexler snapping their elastic funk.
This article appears in May 14 • 2010.
