It's not nostalgia for the Sixties because, musically, Sam and Dave could have made this record in the Seventies. In fact it's still feels new. Nor is it exactly my past because at that time Sam and Dave were outside my sphere of experience. So much for my eighteen year old self. Fat lot he knew. Soul was over there: pop was here. Wrong.
The pleasure of soul has outlasted various musics of the moment, because soul had a freshness and wildness that was disciplined to within an inch of its life. It's an ideal instance of art barely suppressing its energy only in order to release it fresh every time. It's like a box being opened and a real daemon leaping out. Open it again and it leaps out at you with the same energy. You need the box.
And soul is art, if by art we mean something that continues to touch us because, however apparently simple its means, we recognise it to be important and substantial. It doesn't have to look clever, though wit, play, overt intelligence and scholarship are no barrier to art either.
Of course soul is about cultural suppression too. It is the strut-it energy of those just breaking out, the black music of America getting a sweet motor under it and roaring off in style without forgetting anything of pain and indignity. Nor do we forget it.
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Energy disciplined, not so that it can be contained and controlled, but so that it can be released, and released, and released ...
It is the hardest thing for each young poet to discover the form of discipline that works for them, and then it might change over the course of time anyway.
Saw the Stax show at the same age in 1967 with S & D backed by Booker T & MGs, and Redding topping the bill. One of the best concerts of any kind I've ever seen.
Now there's a wiser man than I was at the time. What a show that would have been! Where was it?
In Paris, when I was pseuding around the Left Bank in biack getting very occasional cash from trying to translate builder's estimates, in what we didn't then call a gap year. Carla Thomas on the bill too...Blew all the money I had for food for 3 days on the ticket.
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