Song #16 // Charles Bradley “The World (Is Going Up In Flames)” [No Time For Dreaming]
By now you’ve either heard Charles Bradley’s story or you need to. And if you fall into the former category, it bears repeating: the 60-something parttime cook who had dreamed of being James Brown since he saw him at the Apollo decades earlier. Never giving up and eventually “discovered” by Daptone and paired with the surprisingly tight Menahan Street Band. After a string of loosely distributed singles, this full-length LP may easily be some people’s “Best Of” for 2011. I wouldn’t blame them.
This is the definition of solid.
Echoing back to Stax-era crooners, at times Otis Redding at others Wilson Pickett, this is music as I remember it growing up: unlike Motown’s honey-dripped arrangements, the saltier 70s funk and soul bands sounding like a house party on black vinyl. Now at 62, Bradley has more passion and talent than nearly any contemporary pop musician or band you can mention.
It’s not that it’s a competition, but that it’s as it should be: a storyteller who has earned his right to tell his tales.
There’s something so gloriously unpolished about this album, even when it coos gently and stomps aggressively at just the right moments. There’s a gravelly-ness to it that bumps your tires on an otherwise smooth path. Weathered; the sign of real utility and popularity.
I began listening to this album just before I flew out to SF for the summer, just a few weeks before I caught Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings at Stern Grove. As we got there a few hours early and dug our feet into the eucalyptus-strewn dirt at 60 degree angles, I remember hoping that the show would be a return to a mythic Monterey Pop-era romp. A wake-up call to all the rock’n’roll hipsters that this was still the music of the soul: swinging and true, even through summer San Francisco fog.
It was and it wasn’t. The show was so well produced and so spot-on (and the weather so uncharacteristically sunny) that its luster was almost blinding. It was clear by the time we left that I wanted something as dusty as our picnic blankets. Wine-soaked and tired from the trek that seemed to the edge of California.
I can’t be sure, but had it been Charles Bradley and not Sharon Jones I may have gotten that.
Of course, it’s not a competition.
It’s simply solid.
