El Burro Volador

I am getting over missing Cleo a little bit.  Enough to get on with life, though I think about her every day.  I actually would be comfortable never getting past this stage, thinking about sweet little Weezy every day.  So, I am going to put up a shrine to her as one of those little pages at the top of the screen.  I’ll work on it a little every day until it feels finished.

Anyhow, I thought I’d mostly write about something else today, just because it has been so long since I have written about something else.  I figured that last week’s music experiment would be as good a topic as any.

As some of you may remember, a few weeks back I decided to listen to one of the albums from 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die each week.  Week One was ABBA’s Gold, and week two is what I’m ambling toward telling you about.

I decided to check out the first artist under “B”, in keeping with my alphabetic selection criteria.  This netted me a very interesting album named The Baby Huey Story.

So, what is the Baby Huey story?  Apparently, Huey was a local legend on the Chicago club scene in the late sixties/early seventies, one of those guys who looms large in town and is virtually unheard-of outside the city limits.  Of course, the four-hundred pound Baby Huey would have loomed large anywhere, in a literal sense.

Anyhow, by 1970 Huey’s backing band, The Babysitters, had gotten tight enough that someone finally decided to record the whole package.  Huey was set to become a national star.  While they were finishing up the album, though, the twenty-six-year-old star dropped dead in his hotel room.  They rounded out the five tracks Baby had laid down with a few instrumentals from his band and came out with the album, but it didn’t go anywhere commercially, sinking down into cult classic status until it resurfaced in the 1980′s when every hip hop artist and their dog sampled it.

Anyway, that’s the story, and I admit it was a lot more what I was looking for cachet-wise than a greatest hits compilation from one of the biggest selling pop acts of all time – but how does it sound?

Frickin’ awesome.  Huey’s stuff anyway.  The album leads off with the funky “Listen to Me”, then glides through a throwaway instrumental before hitting the heart of the album, an epic cover of Sam Cooke’s classic “A Change is Going to Come”.  Unlike Cooke’s original, which derived a simple dignity from his burnished voice, this version is earthy, gritty.  It showcases all of Huey’s vocal gifts, including the occasional unearthly shriek or wail, and even a soliloquy to the crowd.

Huey follows this contemplative masterpiece with the feel good “Mighty Mighty” and the absolutely classic “Hard Times”.  Sandwiched between two more skippable instrumentals is “Running”, the last Huey number on the album and a prime piece of sixties psychedelic soul.

This overlooked R&B classic definitely bettered Week One’s pick.  Of course, I am so slow in writing about it that I have been listening to the third pick already, maybe I’ll write about that someday soon.