Growing up in a town that hosted a pivotal battle in the Civil War did not seem like such a big thing until the reenacters started showing up. Never mind that the actual battlefield is a maze of industrial parks, golf courses, the county jail, and an abandoned private school, these farbies take to any open field they can find in order to fight and die like the Confederates who lost the battle before them. Never mind who came out on the loosing end, everyone wants to be a Confederate.
And just as no one was responsible for emptying chamber pots in a former life, no reenactor portrays a lice-ridden conscript whose primary aim is to be face down in the mud until the goddamn shooting stops. The whole point of being a reenactor is to be part of some elite, perhaps in defiance of the circumstances of the reenactor’s everyday life. So when I hear about a Brooklyn-based musical outfit that is playing sixties soul on sixties era instruments, I’m bound to react with no small amount of skepticism. Furthermore, when that band adopts the attitude and nomenclature of the house band of a soul label, the hairs on the back of my ears stand straight up in a fight or flight response.
Each house of Mount Soul Olympus had a band. Motown had the Funk Brothers. Stax had Booker T. and the MGs. Atlantic had the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. Now add house Daptone and their band, the Dap-Kings. And the Dap-Kings have Sharon Jones. Or maybe she has them, since Sharon Jones possesses every bit of the new “I Learned the Hard Way” LP (DAP-019) Sharon Jones’ voice is the main instrument on this record, and while she growls and shouts, the shear power of a syllable from her diaphragm has more impact than all of Celine Dion’s vibrato. They are called pipes for good reason.
And with pipes like that, who needs lyrics? Not Sharon Jones, apparently. With the exception of certain Aretha Franklin songs and most of Stevie Wonder’s work, I am not aware of a soul singer who really uses lyrics anyway. Few are the Hitsville USA songwriters who will have their lyrics bound in rich Corinthian leather and sold along side Lennon / McCartney or Bob Dylan. I also don’t know who she was, but I am sorry for what she did not you, Bosco Mann. A good 60 to 70% of the record consist of songs attributed to Mann which have break-up or romantic betrayal as their subject.
That’s no reason, however, not to grab your girl, your transistor radio, and head out to the beach or the lake or the roof top and do the bump and the stroll until sometime in late September or early October. With horns that are tighter than a pair of Wranglers on Saturday night, a rhythm section carved from marble, and back-up singers who could back up a SWAT team, this is a record that will last all summer long. The charts are tight, and no part is over played. While it is easy to say that the drummer for Spinal Tap really carried the group, in this band there is no such need for a porter. Every man is a Dap-King.
Do not let the retro-sound or the retro-packaging fool you. Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings are not reenacting a by-gone era of great soul music. They are the soul survivors, bringing the music back from the valley of dry bones. If their work in support of Amy Winehouse had not convinced you, this album will. This is great music not because of who it sounds like, it is great music because of what it sounds like. And courtesy their penchant for authenticity, you can really, really hear what it sounds like.
That is if you have a turntable, of course. The album is available on CD and MP3, but it is best experienced on vinyl. Daptone records onto analog tape rather than making digital files. My assumption is that they make analog masters as well. No matter how many overlapping ones and zeros you have, I still contend something somewhere is going to get lost. When you listen to “I Learned the Hard Way” on vinyl, you hear a horn that sounds like a horn. You hear an electric organ that sends a jolt of electricity into you. You hear the fucking reed in Neal Sugarman’s saxophone. So go buy the new record by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. And prepare to shake your ass.