(1975, Legacy Records)
This was one of my folks’ records that I copped when I went away to college. They were divorced, and dad only kept like 30 records, and mom didn’t even have a turntable, so fuck it. When I lived on Grace Street’s 1200 block (Richmond‘s scenic transvestite prostitution block), I’d make loops of nice breaks off records using a dual cassette tape player of my bitch girlfriend’s. I made a ton of loops off this double LP. Part of it is live, and part of it is studio (I think), and it’s really the only Earth, Wind & Fire I’ve ever heard that held my interest even remotely. I used to jam loops off this enough that I bought five or six other Earth, Wind & Fire albums, expecting more of the same, only to be disappointed each and every time.
After Sunz of Man released that terrible reworking of “Shining Star” a few years back, I started to play this double LP again fairly regularly. But honestly, I haven’t put it on a turntable in years. I think it’s in the sideways stack of albums in the corner of the front room that I tore the walls up to put new drywall in and paint and get all tight and crispy for a new bedroom. It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, so maybe I should work on that some more. Or I could just go sit by the river and wait for trains to come by and see if they have any interesting graffiti on them.
But yeah, I’ve been meaning to dig this record out for a while now, to see if there’s some good funk to fuck around with. It was one of my parents few soul albums, and I guess once you get into soul a little deeper, Earth, Wind & Fire is not the first thing you go for. It doesn’t really conjure up baby-making music, so much as middle-aged, successful black folks dancing in church clothes at a soul food buffet. Or something you’d hear at the public lake where black people go to wax their cars on Sunday afternoons.
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