DJ's Old-Time Granny and Dyn-O-Mite spin old school soul, funk, and disco jams! The show airs on special occasions on WCOM radio, 103.5 FM in Carrboro, NC, and streams online worldwide. www.resoul.org
Devin's back with anotha great track. This one's the newest slice of Devin out there, off his latest album One For The Road, which hit the streets on October 8th.
A laid back tribute to a lady who didn't get the attention she deserved, and how things went down from there. This is a track that will hopefully make you treat the special someone in your life a little better, so you don't end up hangin' round some shithouse all by your lonesome! In this interview, Devin reveals a little bit about what went into One For The Road's creation.
When Sploo convinced me to buy out Funhouse Records' leftover back stock after they closed down in 1999, which to this day remains the greatest record score I've ever stumbled onto, I ended up with multiple sealed copies of this track's original 1981 release on Prelude, mixed by Francois Kevorkian and Larry Levan. You'd think it wouldn't get any better than that, kids. But it did! Shep Pettibone's mastermix is the definitive word on this track. However, I also have to give props to another Body Music video:
which features a (modern day) remix of the original Levan/Kevorkian track, synced up with vintage footage of the Strikers performing it at NYC's Peppermint Lounge in the early 80s.
Until today, I'd never heard of Gossip before. Now I know what I've been missing. This track is from their 2009 LP Music for Men, produced by Rick Rubin.
And no, it's not a cover of the Men Without Hats classic.
Somewhere along the way, I came across a doublepack of Kiss FM classics from 1982, all mixed by Shep Pettibone. Off that comes today's joint of the day, a shout out to the lovelorn out there! In fact, I'll make it long-distance dedication to a woman named Jennifer Garam, blogger and founder of the Writeous Chicks, who last month went on what she thought was a great first date with a guy she met online, only to never hear back from him.
This here's a record I had been meaning to listen to for a while before it finally landed on my turntable this morning - Mandrill Is, the second LP by Mandrill, which dropped in early 1972. And when the needle hit the groove, the very first track hit me with an eargasmic blast of funk. By the time it was over, I had a mad smile on my face and my day was off to a great start.
And the rest of the album was dope, too, especially tracks like I Refuse To Smile and the closer, The Sun Must Go Down, which sounds like a missing Strawberry Alarm Clock track off Z-man's party mix from Beyond The Valley of the Dolls. I first discovered Mandrill thanks to DJ Bro Rabb, aka Phil Bell, who gave me a mixtape about 15 years back that I think had their first LP on one side, and a classic Detroit Emeralds album on the other. Originally formed in Brooklyn in 1968, the band's nucleus were the Panama-born Wilson brothers (Carlos, Lou, and Ric). In a 2012 interview given shortly before Lou Wilson's January, 2013 death, he and Ric described the origins of their polyglot funk sound as the "melting pot" of music from all corners of the world that the brothers heard while growing up in Panama. I never knew that Mandrill contributed a track to The Warriors soundtrack, which is a joint for another day, since I just scored that record at a yard sale last month.
A German pressing, this particular copy of Mandrill Is came from a antiques mall in Rhode Island I visited earlier this year. Convinced dude at the counter to sell it to me for two or three bucks, because it was a little scratched. It does skip on one totally out-there track, Universal Rhythms, which is too bad, because that particular track showed Mandrill was onto some meaning of life shit as they broke down the rhythms of the universe, all explained by the Enchanting Wizard of Rhythm. But I was still able to decipher the track's central message, a timeless reminder for us all - "Higher levels of consciousness demand rhythms of peacefulness."