I picked this album up on a whim because it boasted a version of one of my very favorite standards, “Star Eyes,” and a very promising lineup: West Coast golden boy Art Pepper, one of jazz’s many fine Italians*; and Miles Davis’ mid-’50s-era do-no-wrong rhythm section, Red “Fuckin’” Garland, Paul “Fuckin’” Chambers, and “Philly” Joe “Fuckin’” Jones. Those three could back up Herb Alpert on Jew’s harp and it would still cook, hard.

It did not disappoint.

I’ve listened to this album a lot lately, and putting the uniformly excellent musicianship aside for a minute, what keeps me coming back is the hot mix. A great deal of jazz is somewhat diffidently recorded, blurred a little around the edges so as not to ruffle any feathers at the cocktail party, but this album fucking explodes out of the speakers (although, admittedly, I have very good speakers). It is loud. It is unapologetic. There is an imperial shit-ton of bass. The cymbals sizzle and hiss and the snare cracks. And the saxophone slaps you in the face like an admonishing paisan.

Speaking of that sax: this man’s tone owns the West Coast. Geographical alto compatriot Lee Konitz may have routinely peeled off statements of dizzying complexity, but his tone is as reserved and polite as a state function. Pepper’s, on the other hand, combines the warm roundness of Stan Getz’s tenor with an arresting bite. It is the Secret Deodorant of the jazz alto world: strong enough for a man, but smooth as a lady (that’s how that went, right?).

Some choice cuts:

“You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To”

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A very fine take on a very fine Cole Porter standard. But what puts this over the top is Art and Philly Joe trading fours towards the end.

“Imagination”

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Great, cleanly-articulated brush work. Great, cleanly-articulated ballad playing.

“Straight Life”

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One of Pepper’s signature tunes (very ironically named). This album’s only real burner. Who says smack slows you down?

“Tin Tin Deo”

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Chano Pozo is raw like kibbeh nayyeh. As is this version of his song, which, thanks entirely to the assured drumming of Philly Joe, floats effortlessly between Afro-Cuban and bop rhythms. This is really a drummer’s album, come to think of it.

I read a little around the Internet about this set. According to Pepper’s autobiography, also ironically titled Straight Life (seriously, the man was released from a three-year stint at San Quentin in 1964 and managed to get himself thrown back inside the very same year), he only learned of this session the morning of the day it was scheduled, he hadn’t played in months, and his horn was FUBAR. Also, he had shot more horse than a glue factory. True? Eh…maybe not. But the kind of story jazz is made of.

*I have a Unified Theory of Jazz, mentioned in this site’s About page, that 99% of all great jazz musicians are either a) black; b) Jewish; c) Italian; d) Gerry Mulligan.

Kubbeh/קובה למרק/كبّ/Kubeh/Kube/Kubbe

Kubbeh: not to be confused with kibbeh, despite being a variation of the same word for a variation on the same thing. Like kibbeh, these are made from ground meat in a chiefly bulgur shell, but they hail from the northern regions of Iraq rather than Syria, and instead of deep frying, they’re treated to a simmer in broth, making them more dumpling than mezze. In Israel, the word “kubbeh” is applied indiscriminately to both the fried and simmered variety (in Arabic, pronunciation differences between dialects leads to the discrepancy in names for the same thing), but for the sake of clarity, I’m calling these Kurdish-style dumplings “kubbeh” and the fried and raw versions predominant in the Levant “kibbeh.”

Anyway. Kubbeh are a specialty of the Jews of Kurdistan, who once formed large percentages of the population of now-infamous cities like Mosul and Arbil before immigrating to Israel en masse along with the rest of the Iraqi Jewish population in the 1940s and 1950s. My old hood in Jerusalem, centered around the Machane Yehuda market, was heavily Kurdish, home to a Kurdish-Jewish community organization that never seemed open, and dozens of restaurants, social clubs and backgammon parlors that never seemed closed. Several of the restaurants (most notably, Mordoch) specialize in kubbeh-based soups, ranging from the crimson marak kubbeh adom to the sour, green hamousta. So between Jerusalem’s Little Kurdistan and the frozen sections of Israeli supermarkets, kubbeh were never far off. But like edible hummus, Zohar Argov, responsible M16-bearing teenagers and the Divine Presence, we don’t have any here in the far reaches of Exile.

Until now.
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Girl, I see you and your sensibly sexy haircut checkin’ out the carrots.

Beta carotene is good for your eyes, girl.

That shows that you are mad aware of the virtues of fine produce.

Mmm.

Girl, your forehead must be a duke and your chin must be a lady, because between them they got some aristocratic cheekbones.

Mmm.

Yeah.

Aww, no, baby. Don’t play like that.

Don’t you head towards that TV dinner and frozen pizza aisle.

Girl, don’t you do it.

A fine lady like you needs for only the freshest of fruits and vegetables, and meat products within reason.

Girl, let me make you some yellowfin nigiri. I’ll even tone down the wasabi, because I can tell you don’t dig spicy, but you are so fine that I’m willing to overlook that.

You already fillin’ those jeans rightly, ain’t no room for palm oil, potassium citrate and “cheese powder.”

But there is room for me.

Mmm.

Yeah.

Baby girl, you don’t run a Maserati on recycled restaurant oil, you feel me?

Aww, girl, what’d I say?

Shit.

Baby, I hope your daddy’s a cardiologist, because you just broke my heart.

For this unprecedented moment in our nation’s history, can there be any song more appropriate?

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Actually, yes, there can:

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Get on the good foot, Mr. President.

Fish sauce. Liquid umami. A innocuous-seeming whiskey-toned brew that, when popped open, takes about thirty seconds to make an entire room smell like the Jersey Shore. Who wouldn’t want it in their kitchen?

I recently bought a bottle of Tra Chang fish sauce, a high-quality Thai brand, and it’s done far more for me than simply seasoning my stir-fries. It, in its inscrutable Southeast Asian way, has blown my mind.

That, friends, is a thinking man’s label, and I have spent quite awhile pondering what exactly it’s trying to convey.

At first I took it at face value: obviously, the ingredients of the sauce, apparently a fish of unknown denomination and a prawn, weigh exactly the same as an odd-perspective block of 100%. This means quality. This means the sauce is 100% composed of the things composing it. Other fish sauce brands may be content when their ingredients weigh in at only 99%, but not Tra Chang. Tra Chang will not accept a product that weighs even an ounce less than a physical representation of a mathematical abstraction.

But then I looked at the back label, which informs the consumer bashfully that the sauce’s ingredients are “anchovy-fish 70% salt 29% sugar 1%.” But the fish on the label isn’t an anchovy. And whither the prawn? Is Tra Chang entirely a lie? If you placed a block of all of Tra Chang’s untruth on a scale opposite a block of 100%, would it balance? Why is the background exploding? How many prawns would it take to equal the weight of a block of my confusion?

I feel like I can’t trust anything anymore. I swear, next someone will tell me egg creams contain neither eggs nor cream.

I write to you today a different man than I was scant more than a week before. I have grown. I have matured. I have expanded my horizons and waist size. I have consumed a whole bayou’s worth of crawfish. I have, my friends, eaten my way through Acadiana.

Looking out towards the Gulf at Big Lake

My friend John, a Cajun-bred college chum for whom I played the drums in an alt-country band that spectacularly imploded under the weight of several aged-19-years egos, and who will allow me talk his ear off about cooking in exchange for home-cooked food, had the bright idea a couple months ago to go on a gustatory pilgrimage from Austin to the homeland around Lake Charles. And so it was that the weekend before last he, his girlfriend Kristen and I set out on a voyage to the crawfish-scented heart of Cajun country for a three-day binge on the fried, buttered, drowned and smothered Continental-cum-crustacean cuisine of those long-expelled French Canadians. In southern Louisiana, God bless it, the roux is dark, the people are Catholic and the arteries explode by 55. We were determined, kike and swamp kike alike, to sacrifice our circulatory systems on the altar of étouffée and andouille. And we did. Lord, we did. I would have taken pictures, but I’m unable to bring myself to take pictures of food anywhere outside my own kitchen. It’s tacky. So use your imagination, kids.

I should note that despite their frequent confusion in the popular imagination, Cajun cuisine (originating among the exiled Francophones of south-central and southeast Louisiana) and Creole cuisine (originating among the culturally and ethnically mixed Creoles of New Orleans) are fairly distinct, even though they share several dishes. Creole cuisine draws heavily from aristocratic French haute cuisine with distinct Spanish and African influences; Cajun cuisine evolved out of peasant French cooking traditions, and was insulated from the pernicious influence of the yellow-bellied Spaniard while picking up foods, cooking techniques and culinary vocabulary from the local Indians. It’s easy to spot the differences: if the dish in front of you has tomatoes, hot peppers or beans, it’s Creole. If it has something that was recently clubbed to death in a swamp before being heavily cayenne peppered and served over rice, it’s Cajun. If it features blackened anything, it’s Emeril food, and thus neither Cajun nor Creole. Know the difference and you’ll never utter the phrase “spicy Cajun red beans and rice” again.

The trip marked both my first time in Lake Charles and my first time back to my old southern Louisiana stomping grounds since 2005; my planned return back then was forestalled by the series of unfortunate meteorological occurrences which precipitated my luckless Israeli odyssey. The landscape had changed a bit thanks to a couple of lovely Cat 5 ladies, but the feeling of content stagnation that hangs over Louisiana like August humidity hadn’t changed a bit. I was surprised to realize that I had missed it.

We stayed on the shores of Big Lake in a nicely-appointed beach house on stilts (called, modestly, a “camp” in the local argot) owned by John’s rarely-glimpsed father, a prominent local attorney and sports novelist who spent the weekend tourneying about the immaculately manicured artificial hills of the Lake Charles golf course with the son of Bing Crosby. Bing himself showed up in the form of a vinyl copy of White Christmas John’s stepmom had perched on the end table in the living room; Son-of-Bing remained unseen, although John’s grandmother, an eccentric of the very finest variety, told us over her restaurant water glass-sized vodka on the rocks that we hadn’t missed much, as she had always preferred Frank Sinatra anyway. She also invited the three of us back next month to witness the creation of her crawfish bisque, an event of apparently quasi-religious significance in the family.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Our first order of business upon arrival was to attempt to eat our weight in crawfish. The local seafood shanty obliged with enormous steaming platters of the ugly little bastards. It’s a lot of work to eat five pounds of crawfish; a fat specimen still only yields about a cocktail shrimp’s worth of meat, and you have to pry off the tail to get to it. But put down enough beer and, like most everything else, what started out arduous quickly becomes a good deal of fun. So between us John and I dismembered ten pounds of Acadiana’s finest edible aquatic bugs. For dessert, we each had a big plate of crawfish étouffée. Kristen, a vegetarian who had, at least for the weekend in confirmed meat country, essentially given up the green-conscious ghost, went experimental with a dish of oysters in a heavy yellow cheese sauce, which almost managed to transcend the oddness of its conception and arrive at “good.” Ten pounds of crustacean, half a dozen bottles of beer, good company and a view on the water at sunset all conspired to create a ferocious dinner. And that was only the first night.

The next day our ragged and insatiable party was joined by John’s little sister, back in town from college, and we swung by a popular 24-hour diner to shovel down the world’s most Southern breakfast, to which any written description does not do justice. Imagine, if you will, a baked potato. Then imagine that said baked potato had been buried under a mountain of grilled chicken and melted cheddar cheese. Then imagine that the grilled chicken and melted cheddar cheese were really only theoretical constructs anyway, because they had been rendered completely invisible by a Biblical deluge of cream gravy. Then imagine there were some grits, and also that your heart stopped out of spite for your brain. Simply breakfast.

The day meandered towards a vague plan to go mucking about in the wetlands, or at least on the paved trails leading through the wetlands, in order to see some of the native game, known in the common parlance as “alligators.” Such dangerous business demanded further dietary fortification, so we stopped at a roadside shack to pick up some cracklings (gratons), deep-fried cubes of pork skin with meat and gristle still attached, a Church-sanctioned form of mass suicide on the part of the Cajun people. Those were good, although perhaps not good enough to justify the three months every single one removed from my life expectancy. The same shack also equipped us with crawfish pistolettes, sweet and flaky rolls filled with stewy crawfish goodness, essentially a portable version of crawfish étouffée.

Southern Louisiana wetlands, it turns out, look essentially like wetlands everywhere else, although they are significantly hotter and full of large relict reptiles. I mused that if Purgatory existed, it must look much like a Louisiana wetlands state park: endless expanses of marsh grass and cattails on either side of an asphalt path leading to nowhere to in particular. It’s not Hell, but it ain’t like there’s a Ramada neither. The gators were disinclined to put in an appearance, much to the dismay of John’s sister, so we piled back into the car and turned back towards relative civilization. Then we saw some out of the car window, sunning in the little canal by the road. So let that be a lesson: if you want to see nature in Louisiana, be it alligators or neon-clad canal-fishin’ locals, stay in the car.

On the way back, we hit up a gas station – America! – for yet another local delicacy, boudin, a delicious goo with aspirations to sausage status made out of swiney mystery meat, rice and herbs stuffed into a casing. And then? Well, then we went to dinner. John’s aforementioned grandmother treated us all to a grand feast at a seafood restaurant, which made up for its inferior crawfish with great deadly piles of fried shrimp, fried catfish, fried oysters and fried stuffed crab. We washed it all down with Abita, which if memory serves may well have been fried.

Heading back on Memorial Day, which locked up Lake Charles solid, we chanced upon an open restaurant/game animal processing facility a town or two over for what would be our last Louisianan hurrah: jambalaya, gumbo and an armful of local sausage and filé powder to stock the kitchens back home. A fitting and gut-busting end to three days of unrestrained binging.

Necessarily, my first order of business upon returning was to track down a source of live in-season crawfish, Louisianan andouille and tasso in Austin. Louisiana isn’t that far away, but it’s enough of schlep that I worry all that plaque might start to clear up if I don’t learn how to make Cajun suicide cuisine myself. It’s pretty easy: you just gotta start with a whole stick of butter and go from there…

I’ll admit it: I like beer. I’m not making a bold statement; pretty much everyone in the world, except for people in those countries that cut off hands for minor criminal offenses, is fond of the stuff. When even the Turks have a national brand, you have a popular beverage on your hands. But while everyone likes beer, some drinkers are bound and determined to turn beer from a pleasant and universal diversion to a grim and sober ratings game in which beers are ruthlessly lined up and measured, after which any found to be somehow deficient or not Western European in origin are scorned and summarily eliminated.

I know, the concept sounds German, but this growing beer snobbery seems to be chiefly an American concern, a way of overcompensating for the grave sin of allowing our very worst beers to take over the world. The Germans are not beer snobs, because they don’t have to be: their tap water is 8 proof and their children are weaned on Löwenbräu. The first word of 48% of German children is “Reinheitsgebot” (the first word of the other 52%, of course, is “lebensraum“). In America, though, we have as little use for subtlety as we do for A-cups and open borders. We discovered a few years ago that much of the world’s beer isn’t pale amber and made from rice, and goddammit, we’re gonna buy it all and we’re gonna like it better than anyone else likes it. Because we’re the best.

And so we now have the cerevisaphile, a new class of connoisseur created when the overflowing barrel of national wine pretension sloshed over into the beer aisle. These are men – and make no mistake, this is an entirely male pursuit – who gingerly decant their beer, time the duration of its head with a stopwatch and make elaborate tasting notes between sips. (“Hoppy character, smells of wheat with distinct notes of yeast and an overwhelmingly liquid mouthfeel.”) But our boy Newton wasn’t wrong, and unsurprisingly the American beernaissance has given rise to a vociferous cadre of counterrevolutionaries, clinging with grim determination to the boozy soda water that slaked America’s thirst throughout the century of its ascendancy. For every dude who wants you to know that he can tell a weizen from a weizenbock, there are three who think he’s a fag for not drinking Old Milwaukee.

In a perfect world, these types would be relegated to bars, liquor stores and automotive sporting events, but unfortunately, our noticeably imperfect world has Tim Berners-Lee in it, and so every single one of these people has migrated to the Internet. Especially to beer ratings sites, where they gleefully share tasting notes and accusations of pansy-assedness. And it is those sites – specifically, RateBeer.com – that are the focus of this series of posts.

The idea is simple: I pick a terrible but much-loved American beer, the kind churned out by our major breweries and enthusiastically consumed at barbecues, sports games, pool halls and racialist power rallies all over our fair land, and then I scour RateBeer.com’s review pages for the beer for both a pretentious, overcomplicated cerevisaphile takedown and an indignant, often barely coherent glowing 5-star endorsement. Basically, I’m looking for the worst possible way to express two very basic ideas: in the former case, “It sucks”; in the latter case, “WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

We start, fittingly enough, with Pabst Blue Ribbon, a beer of aggressive mediocrity which has not only retained its faithful following among the blue collar but entered the anemic embrace of those trendy Williamsburg types, who think pretending to be poor is the very apogee of arch irony (it’s funny, you see, cuz they’re not). So without further ado, the best of RateBeer.com on the most middling of American beers:

Overweening Cerevisaphile Sez:

Pours a clear straw sort of color with a quickly dissipating head leaving no lace, bubbles flying up from the bottom. Mostly a grain smell, pretty clean, with a hint of floralness. Grainy in taste, but not in a bad way, a little bit of corn, and only a touch of hops. Taste almost dances on your tongue with the amount of carbonation. I imagine this as a great beer with many different foods. Higher carbonation, but seems to be a nice addition to this one. Light to medium body, I expected very light body, but having a little something there is nice. I usually don’t save any room for macro’s in my fridge, but I may be able to squeeze a little room for this.

I’m not sure if the PBR demographic, or anyone else, is concerned with how much “lace” the stuff leaves. Or at least, nobody goes to the mini-mart and carefully considers the optimal lace-to-price ratio of all the beers sold in individual tallboy cans out of the cooler full of crushed ice.

Overburdened Cracker Sez:

Okay so you’re layin on a beach, minding your own buisness when all of a sudden…BAM!!! you get hit in the crotch with something…it’s an ice cold PBR. You crack it open & take a sip and all of a sudden the Doobie Brothers show up and they’re playin “China Grove” and it rocks…hard. You’ve just experienced Liquid Cold Sunshine that gets better each and every time. Natty Ice and Genny Cream Ale are for fratboys…Pabst is for the distinguished alcoholic.

Okay, that’s actually kind of funny, but…maybe I’m conceited, maybe I need to get the redness of my blood checked, but a product that interrupts a pleasant reverie with testicular pain and an appearance by the Michael McDonald Clearinghouse Players doesn’t get five stars in my book. That is such a beer commercial conceit, though: a man pops a beer in the overbearing drabness of the real world and is magically transported to a hoppy carnival land where real men play some real MOR rock while fake blondes shake some fake tits. That, son, is America. It’s too bad that doesn’t really happen. It would force the hipsters to move on to a new beverage of choice (Olde English eight hundos? Molson Lite? Pulque?), unless of course they find the Doobie Brothers somehow ironic.

Next up: Schlitz!

I learned something today. I learned that Tony Chachere’s, the seasoning blend of salt, salt, salt, salt, salt, cayenne pepper, garlic and salt which is, along with Crystal hot sauce, de rigueur on every Louisiana table, was actually invented and marketed by a guy named Tony Chachere from St. Landry Parish.

This came as a surprise. I had always assumed Tony Chachere was an imaginary corporate focus group food mascot, like Ronald McDonald, Aunt Jemima or Rachael Ray. I thought that somewhere deep in the bowels of ConAgra marketing research drones had built the perfect ersatz Cajun, cartoonized and outfitted with a chef’s hat and glasses scientifically proven to drive consumers to heavily season their food with the company’s proprietary lab-tested spice blend, which they then could spin off into a whole product line of similarly branded food-type products.

But I was wrong. He’s real, man. He’s real. Look at him:

Once upon a time, somewhere deep within the dark beating heart of the swamp, specifically Opelousas, the real live Tony Chachere stood whisking a skillet of dark brown roux, plotting and waiting for the moment when he would convert it into a container of no-fuss just-add-water powder and in so doing conquer America (Note: Soul and Gone does not recommend making roux out of powder, unless the powder happens to be flour which you then add to heated oil, drippings or butter.)

But really, what next? Is someone going to tell me that Paul Prudhomme is real too?

(More on Cajun food coming up…)

Kasha Varnishkes/קאשה וורנישקס (כוסמת עם אטריות)/קאשע ווארנישקעס
каша варнишки/Kasha Varnishkas/Kasha Varnishka

Mmm. Childhood food. I don’t think anyone ever acquires a taste for kasha varnishkes as an adult; for the dish to be truly appreciated, the earthiness of the kasha and the fleeting sweetness of the caramelized onions have to be augmented by recollection, by the sense memories of your grandmother’s kitchen as experienced from your below-the-countertop vantage point. Eating kasha varnishkes without ever having had an Eastern European Jewish grandmother is like eating hummus without tehina.

Kasha varnishkes is a heavyweight of Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine in America, familiar to probably every American Ashkenazi with roots in Eastern Europe. I grew up eating it in my Baba Larisa’s little apartment, where it was usually followed by her airy, moist apple cake, but until not so long ago, I was under the impression that it was a Russian dish. My mother’s parents, from the Austro-Hungarian/Romanian/Ukrainian/Romanian/Ukrainian/Russian/Ukrainian city Chernivtsi (isn’t 20th century European history fun?), had their Jewishness, or at least their willingness to talk much about it, effectively beaten out of them by the lightning jab and cross of the Nazis and the Communists, which is why it took me so long to realize that many of the foods I had grown up identifying as Russian, kasha varnishkes among them, were actually Ashkenazi Jewish.

Kasha is the Slavic word for any kind of cereal porridge, a basic staple of Eastern European cuisine – but in Yiddish, which adopted the word from the Slavic languages, and in English, which adopted the word from Yiddish, it refers pretty much exclusively to buckwheat groats. The etymology of varnishkes is murkier. It means “bow-tie noodles,” but it appears (to my knowledge) only in the context of this dish. It’s a Yiddish word, at least in structure and phonology, but the Yiddish word for “noodles” is the unrelated lokshn. Obvious cognates don’t appear in the main source languages of Eastern Yiddish (medieval German, classical Hebrew, and the surrounding Slavic tongues). The Italians, who probably invented bow-tie noodles, call them farfalle (butterflies), so much as in World War I, they’re little help. I couldn’t even find a consensus on how to spell varnishkes in Yiddish. I was beginning to think, after much research (even, vey is mir, reading Yiddish newsgroups), that like General Tso, tikka masala, and the global success of Domino’s, varnishkes would have to be consigned to the great realm of culinary mystery. But then I asked my mother, who knows everything.

“It’s from vareniki,” she said. I was skeptical. Filled dumplings seemed a fairly far cry from bowtie noodles and kasha. But then she started making sense: she explained that “varnishkes” was a Yiddish corruption of “варенички” (varenichki), the diminutive of vareniki, and that the dish arose as a quick and easy version of those significantly more arduous stuffed pasta dumplings. Those lazy Jews. It makes sense; varnishkes sounds pretty damned close to varenichki. Reigning lady of Jewish cooking Joan Nathan mentions a kasha varnishkes recipe dating back to 1925 that was “basically a kreplach-type noodle stuffed with kasha, buckwheat groats, and gribenes” – which implies that, at some point in its history, kasha varnishkes was literally kasha vareniki, that is, noodle dumplings stuffed with kasha. So there you have it: a mystery even the Internet had no answer for, solved in thirty seconds by my mother. And they give Joan Nathan the million-dollar ethnic cookbook deals. Feh.

But for now, less inherent unfairness of life, more kasha varnishkes recipe. Read on:
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My musical taste these days usually plies a fairly reliable course between reggae and jazz, with frequent calls at R&B, hip-hop and MPB, but occasionally it will drift a bit off course and I’ll stumble upon something uncharted that commands my attention for a time. Lately? The Isley Brothers. Obscure? Hardly. Outside the realm of my normal musical affections? Not at all. But somehow, to me, overlooked. No other group was able to keep abreast of every major development in black American pop for as long. They could sear nearly as hot as Funkadelic, and then turn it around and quiet storm hard enough to break Smokey Robinson’s windows. But despite all my explorations of bygone generations of black pop, I only recently figured that out.

Oh, I was familiar enough with the early part of Isleys’ career. “Shout,” “Twist and Shout,” and “It’s Your Thing” are as imprinted on my consciousness as they are on every other living person’s. I’d even heard some of their very early, basically doo-wop material…

“Angels Cried”

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…and of course I was aware that the Isleys had once employed (and lived with) a very young, pre-fame Jimi Hendrix…

“Move Over and Let Me Dance” (ft. Jimi Hendrix)

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(Isn’t it odd how an Isley Brothers song that happens to feature Jimi Hendrix as a sideman sounds like nothing other than a Jimi Hendrix original? The man had a signature sound and gone.)

Somehow though, mea maxima culpa, I had overlooked the group’s post-’60s efforts. I really don’t know how.

I began to realize the error of my ways when, by chance, I heard the blistering “That Lady (Pts. 1 & 2),” a remake of a song from the Isleys’ earlier days, which despite being a fairly major hit in 1973 had escaped my usual awareness of the pop culture of yesteryear. A massive oversight on my part, I know.

“Who’s That Lady?” (1964 original)

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“That Lady (Pts. 1 & 2)”

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So I began acquiring and soaking up their albums from the Gaye-and-Hayes era, getting particularly into 3 + 3, in which the Brothers traded in their snazzy R&B suits and pompadours for the fringe, leather, velvet, chrome lamé and open shirts worn by any self-respecting band of ’70s Afro spacemen, and brought on the younger generation of Isleys as full-time instrumentalists and official band members – including Strat-slinger Ernie Isley, who had obviously paid close attention during the period of his cohabitation with Mr. Hendrix. 3 + 3 and the few albums that follow it demonstrate the Isleys’ unparalleled ability to toe big-name funk’s finest line: aiming for the charts without sacrificing the groove. A few dance hits aside, Parliament/Funkadelic’s 40-odd members were – God bless them – too busy snorting their way through a Chocolate Milky Way of cocaine to make a concerted effort at freeing America’s mind and pop charts, and for all Earth, Wind and Fire’s success, we must remember that basically only a few tasty guitar solos separated them from being the black KC and the Sunshine Band. No, when it came to the R&B and pop chart-toppers in the ’70s, it didn’t get much better than the Isleys. By the middle of the decade, they had even begun, in classic Isley fashion, to smell what Sly Stone and War had been cooking up the past few years, i.e. fist-in-the-air, brick-through-the-Man’s-window protest funk:

“Fight the Power (Pts. 1 & 2)”

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But their compelling funksmanship aside, perhaps the Isleys’ greatest (and most surprising) strength is taking drecky MOR ’70s pop songs and stapling balls to them. Even James fucking Taylor.

See, now here is, ahem, sweet baby James’s “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight,” culled from the greatest hits album I downloaded for the purposes of this post and then immediately deleted before it could make me find Carly Simon, and by extension Steven Tyler and Seabiscuit, attractive.

“Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight” (James Taylor)

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God, what on Earth would ever make any woman want to let him be lonely? No, really, do you realize how many white children were conceived to this song, how many drape-haired and mustachioed ’70s-sensi-dudes let fly their seed to the sound of the hacky saxophone solo? No wonder the resulting generation was so into depression and flannel. My advice: don’t shake hands with any white American 35-year-olds – you might catch the Taylor.

But now here are the Isley Brothers doing the very same song, the song penned by the bony alabaster fingers of James Taylor:

“Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight” (Isley Brothers)

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How the shaw ’nuff did they do that? I mean, in a way, it’s justice; Taylor gained much of his fortune by turning in limp, colorless interpretations of black pop classics (see, or on second thought don’t, “How Sweet It Is”), and to have black artists take his limp, colorless, aggressively insipid originals and render them somehow awesome seems like sweet revenge. They can even do a number on “Fire and Rain,” which is an even worse song.

“Fire and Rain” (Isley Brothers)

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It makes one curious to see if dewhitening device that apparently came into the possession of the brothers Isley circa 1972 could be applied to other contemporary shlockmeisters – say, Seals & Crofts. Hey, of course it could:

“Summer Breeze”

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Still, for all their skill at resuscitating the hypoxemic hits of the early ’70s, even the Isleys can’t make the concept of imaginary jasmine sound any less dumb.

And their ballads? Yes, wonder of wonders, even those are alright.

“Let Me Down Easy”

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“For the Love of You (Pts. 1 & 2)”

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Still, in funk music, the ballad, which by its very nature requires a band to step back from a wrought-iron funk groove, is fraught with peril. No amount of Fender Rhodes warbling can save a song like “At Your Best (You Are Love)” from a terrible lyric.

“At Your Best (You Are Love)”

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At your best, you are love
You’re a positive motivating force within my life

Not only does it reek of couples counseling (“You need to be a positive motivating force within each other’s lives!”), it begs the question: what is she at her worst? One imagines the Ron Isley family dinner parties culminating in impromptu booze-soaked renditions of “At Your Worst (Goddammit Woman Shut the Hell Up or So Help Me I Will Sell You to P-Funk) (Pts. 1 & 2).”

Perhaps songs like “At Your Best (You Are Love)” were an ill portent. Any period of creative fecundity must eventually wither away, and by the beginning of the 1980s, the Isley Brothers had become a textbook case of that sad artistic truth. The less said about their post-’70s career the better, especially once they discovered hip-hop, although I must profess a certain affection for timely “Sexual Healing” rip-off “Between the Sheets,” partly because it was on the soul station in GTA: San Andreas, and partly because ’80s-era bedroom freakin’ music is always somehow so honest.

“Between the Sheets”

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So take my musical oversight, and the resulting Isleycation, as a lesson: when flipping through the stacks for the best of the obscure, one shouldn’t overlook the best of the popular. And remember, no matter how bad a song is, someone out there armed only with a Stratocaster and an elaborately embroidered double-breasted velvet suit has the power to make it kick ass. And that’s a comforting thought.