CARLA THOMAS
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Recording years |
Main genre |
Music sample |
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1960–1974 |
Classic R&B |
A Love Of My Own (1961) |
Page
contents:
- Gee Whiz
(1961)
CARLA THOMAS
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Recording years |
Main genre |
Music sample |
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1960–1974 |
Classic R&B |
A Love Of My Own (1961) |
Page
contents:
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Album
released: 1961 |
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Tracks: 1) Gee Whiz (Look At His Eyes); 2)
Dance With Me; 3) A Lovely Way To Spend An Evening; 4) Your Love; 5) Fools
Fall In Love; 6) To The Aisle; 7) The Masquerade Is Over; 8) A Love Of My Own; 9) Promises; 10) It Ain’t Me; 11)
For You; 12) The Love We Shared. |
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REVIEW
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One might feel
tempted to accuse Rufus of nepotism, promoting his daughter through personal
connections and all, but only a very cynical person could refuse to see the
genuine talent — Carla had a fine, exquisite voice, an outstanding ability to
interpret other people’s material, and
a moderate songwriting capacity of her own; allegedly, she wrote her to-be
signature tune, ‘Gee Whiz’, all by herself when she was but 16 (or 15,
according to other sources). In fact, judging by their comparative
discographies, Father Rufus probably did not even think of himself as a
proper «artist» for the first three decades of his career — more like a
vaudeville entertainer and a cultural promoter — and his own recording career
only took off after Carla had been successfully established as a regular
recording artist and hitmaker. That said,
Rufus certainly knew how to pull a few strings for his precious little girl,
starting with getting her into Memphis’ Teen Town Singers at the age of 10
(!), way back in 1952, when he had to convince the people in charge to bend
the rules that said you had to be in high school to be a member. And it was
for Rufus (or, at least, through Rufus’ authority) that the owners of
Memphis’ Satellite Records, Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, agreed to
distribute a duet that he recorded with Carla in 1960 — a little romp called
‘Cause I Love You’, very highly derivative of the then-current New Orleanian
R&B and, as has been noted, most likely based directly on Jesse Hill’s ‘Ooh Poo Pah Doo’ (my
own ears immediately caught the resemblance to Allen Toussaint and Chris Kenner’s
‘I Like It Like That’,
but that song actually came out later — they all use a very similar musical
momentum, though). We certainly
might find it a little problematic for a father to be singing a love duet
with his own daughter, especially one in which the protagonist claims to
never have cheated on his lover with another woman — but only if we begin
overthinking the nature of show business; as long as we clearly separate real
life from acting, there should be no trouble at all enjoying the duet, with
Rufus and Carla possibly taking Ike and Tina as their role models. And, for
that matter, the 18-year old Carla here sounds more mature, confident, and
experienced than she does on her later solo hits — she was versatile enough
to switch between «strong adult» and «vulnerable adolescent» personalities at
will, making ‘Gee Whiz’ seem all the more impressive in comparison. Anyway,
‘Cause I Love You’ is really fun and, also, really unusually tough for Carla,
whose rise to fame would all mostly be due to sentimental ballads. (The
bluesy B-side ‘Deep Down Inside’ is also far closer to good old rough’n’tough
R&B than everything that was to come, but it’s not as fun as the A-side). Although the
single did not chart, it is difficult to overrate its crucial historical
importance. In addition to Carla, Rufus, and Rufus’ other child, Marvell, on
keyboards, ’Cause I Love You’ also featured Lewie Steinberg on bass guitar
and a 16-year old Booker T. Jones on saxophone — the very first time that two
of the future members of Booker T. & The MGs came together in the studio.
And that’s not all: ‘Cause I Love You’ was the song that caught the ear of
none other than Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records, who, on the strength of
it, offered Satellite Records a distribution deal. One year later,
«Satellite» became «Stax», and with the power of Atlantic’s support,
Stax-Volt began its legendary ascension — which, as it turns out, was all
born out of this little spark ignited by Carla and Rufus in innocent novelty
fashion. For Carla
personally, though, the song meant next to nothing; her true love at the time
was romantic balladry, and Satellite Records was the first company to agree
to give her a chance in that business. ‘Gee Whiz’, produced by Chips Moman (who
would himself soon become one of Memphis’ hottest producers, all the way up
to From Elvis In Memphis), might
seem to be just an ordinary orchestrated doo-wop waltz at first — almost too
oddly old-fashioned even for 1961 with its softened tastes. There is one
difference, though: the voice. The
music may be a decade too old, but Carla’s performance here is much more in
line with contemporary girl groups than pop singers, male or female, black or
white, from any time in the Fifties. She delivers her lines with all the
starry-eyed giddiness of a teenaged girl (well, she was a teenaged girl!) hopelessly lost in her first romance, in
just about the perfect vocal tone for this setting — that of a person who’s
just willingly cancelled all her defenses and succumbed to sweet temptation. The
message is nothing new under the sun, just another modern variation on the
eternal Romeo-wherefore-art-thou-Romeo
theme, but the way it is delivered, almost bordering on artistic indecency,
is most certainly what triggered public interest, with the song scoring high
on both black and white charts. The B-side, ‘For You’, co-credited to Carla
and Chips Moman, was a poppy dance number more in the vein of ‘Cause I Love You’,
but still fun and catchy enough to generate a little bit of uptempo joy. The same formula — slow ballad vs. relatively more uptempo pop number —
would be repeated for Carla’s second single, released in March 1961, and while
Moman’s ‘Promises’ is probably more distinguished for its tasteful, flourishy
piano playing (presumably by brother Marvell again) than its hooks or vibes, the
A-side, ‘A Love Of My Own’, might just be Carla’s best recording ever. It
failed to repeat the success of ‘Gee Whiz’, most likely owing to the simple
biological fact that humans tend to prefer happy songs over tragic songs (not
surprisingly, Carla would not have another truly big pop hit on the general
charts until the equally happy ‘B-A-B-Y’ in 1966), and it takes a tremendous amount of stunning power to
get a tragic song to score high marks on the commercial scale — something on
the level of ‘Remember (Walking In The Sand)’ (even The Shangri-Las, I think,
managed to score only once or twice, remaining as a very modest commercial
proposition at all other times). ‘A Love Of My Own’, unfortunately, does not
quite have that kind of thing — its melody rests on the generic Fifties’
progression, and its opening acappella lines do not have that immediate pull
which ‘Gee Whiz’ exerts over the listener, so one might need a couple of
extra listens before the magic starts working... and then it’s a tragic
magic, and not a lot of people find themselves in the mood for that. But give it a chance, and ‘A Love Of My Own’ might ultimately feel much
more rewarding than ‘Gee Whiz’. At the very least, it is just as realistic in
terms of amplified teenage feelings — only this time, Carla is singing about
her inability to score, and the lyrics are fairly ambitious for a young lady:
"I look at the mountains, I look
at the sun / I look at everything Mother Nature has done / Then I wanna know /
Why can’t I find a love of my own". It’s as if we just found out
that ‘Gee Whiz’ was merely a wistful fantasy, while this here is the harsh reality. The mini-genius touch to push
things over the edge is in how the backing vocals, first starting life as a
standard gospel choir, eventually engage Carla in dialog, serving as the
inner voice pushing her to get those feelings in the open, making those "why... WHY? — can’t... CAN’T..."
ever more poignant. There are other minor edgy points as well: wait for that
middle section where she goes "Love,
how I’ve waited for you / But it looks like you’ll never come / So I sit
down, sit down and think this thing over / Is it something I’ve done?"
and watch out for the transition from the first sit down, with regular accent on the first word, to the second "sit DOOOWN!" with a strong
emphasis on down!, as if
transitioning to a commanding teacher tone. It adds a bit of a self-castigating
vibe that plenty of modern audiences will find outdated and humiliating (of
course), but then tragedy is always best served with the tragic hero tearing
at him- or herself rather than life simply knocking them over, doesn’t it? In between ‘Gee Whiz’ and ‘A Love Of My Own’, it pretty much took Carla Thomas
less than half a year to establish herself as, perhaps, the single most exciting fresh female presence on the soul/R&B
scene from that period — much as I like, for instance, Aretha Franklin’s
earliest records, there is nothing on them that quite captures either the
boundless joy of the former single or the equally boundless pain of the
latter. It shouldn’t even be that much of a criticism to observe that Carla’s
first LP, rather hastily assembled to capitalize on the success of the
singles, does not do justice to their quality — given the overall time
context, that should probably be predictable. As talented as she was, Carla
could not have written enough songs on her own to fill up two whole sides of
vinyl; and, in fact, her only other self-written song here, called ‘It Ain’t Me’
(not to be confused with Bob Dylan’s
‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’, which was not even written by that time), is relatively weak
in the shadow of the similarly themed ‘A Love Of My Own’ — just another
generic tragic waltz, but comparatively formulaic and also shot down by the
hilariously confusing lyrical ineptness of "Someone else is in your arms my love" (okay), closely followed
by "And it ain’t me" (well
DUH, brilliant observation and all). She still has a great voice — a
one-of-a-kind combination of sweetness and raspiness that adds a bit of depth
and discomfort to even the sappiest material, helping me enjoy the LP from
start to finish, no matter how many of these generic orchestrated waltzes I
have to endure. The selection of covers with which the LP had been filled up is fairly
predictable — a mix of old school Tin Pan Alley with more recent R&B hits,
such as The Drifters’ ‘Dance With Me’ and ‘Fools Fall In Love’ — and while
this is as far removed from the crunchy, funky sound of classic Stax-Volt as
possible, most of the songs are in good taste, and even those that are not so
much in good taste are still redeemed by Carla’s innate ability for drama. The
only one I really don’t care for at all is ‘The Masquerade Is Over’, whose
maudlin spirit even Carla is hardly capable of ennobling; but when, for
instance, she tries on for size ‘To The Aisle’, originally recorded by The Five Satins in 1957,
the song — particularly with the aid of those gospel backing vocals — almost
takes on a slightly doom-laden atmosphere. Okay, I might be putting a little
too much into it, but honestly, the way she delivers lines like "then he puts a ring on your finger..."
get me thinking about a potential proper Goth cover of the song, preferably
with the likes of Tim Burton filming the accompanying video. I’m sure that
was never the original intention, but it just goes to show the unusual
qualities of Carla’s singing — some of which she might not have been aware of
herself. It’s even more poignant on Carla’s first single that came after the LP —
too late to be included on it — one more formulaic doo-wop waltz, sure, but
just as wonderfully reflecting yet another shade of teen psychology as the
two previous ones: on ‘(Mama, Mama) Wish Me Good Luck’, she vacillates
between the same giddy ecstasy that permeated ‘Gee Whiz’ and a sort of
fearful apprehension — her "mother,
mother, wish me good luck" is far more than just a ritualistic turn
of phrase, but rather a strong reminder that the «luck» in question is liable
to change at any moment, and that total boundless happiness is just one step
away from loss and catastrophe. The song itself is nothing; the vocal
delivery is everything, and once again Carla proves herself here to be a
young master of exquisite subtlety, outdoing most of the competition in one
swoop — the power of those overtones is on some Ray Charles level, rather
than Aretha or any of the other young debutantes circa 1960–1961. That the
world was so slow and unwilling to catch up to it, in my opinion, was a bit
of a disaster, but then again, the world at large is never a big fan of
subtle overtones. |
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