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Joe Bihari
17th December 2013
Joe Bihari’s death on Thanksgiving Day at the age of 88, now leaves Art Rupe and Phil Chess as the sole survivors of a unique group of post-war independent record men. Their efforts created a body of music which remains a major influence on popular music.
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Philip Chevron
7th October 2013
(17 June 1957 - 8 October 2013)
Johnny Jukebox has smashed his last Telecaster through the television screen.
56 is no age to be dying. With Philip’s sad and sadly not unexpected death we sorely miss the old man he should have become and who would undoubtedly have continued to exercise his active and enquiring mind with such passion, purpose and humanity.
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Mary Love
23rd June 2013
Mary Love Remembered
I first came across Mary Love’s wonderful music as a teenager, dancing to ‘You Turned My Bitter Into Sweet’ and ‘Lay This Burden Down’ at “Old Soul” gatherings for lovers of the uptempo mid 60s soul sound (soon to be coined Northern Soul in the UK). As a record collector I had picked up other Modern label recordings like ‘Let Me Know’ and ‘Hey Stoney Face’ over the years and got to love her ballad ‘Baby I’ll Come’ too. In the late 70s my friend and eventual co-founder of the 6Ts Randy Cozens turned me on to ‘I’m In Your Hands’, the flip of ‘You Turned My Bitter Into Sweet’, that I had foolishly neglected for the excellence of the disc’s other side. With Randy’s championing of it that track became something of an anthem for the early 6Ts dances and when we switched to all-nighters it was adopted as an appropriately emotional and majestic ender to the night’s soul session.
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Darondo
13th June 2013
Darondo 1946-2013
William Daron Pulliam – better known as funk and soul icon Darondo – passed away from heart failure on Sunday June 9th.
Born and bred in Berkeley, California, Darondo first played professionally at the age of 18 in the Witnesses, a blue-eyed soul troupe resident at East Bay teen club the Lucky 13 in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until the early 1970s that the singer-guitarist hit his stride. He fashioned a unique blend of down-and-dirty funk and sweet soul, informed by Al Green, James Brown, the Dells and others, but always identifiable by his own special delivery, as he slid from gravelly baritone to wailing falsetto in the space of a measure. Being a musician was however just one facet of this gregarious, flamboyant individual, who made the scene in San Francisco and the greater Bay Area with snazzy threads and a tricked-out Rolls Royce Silver Cloud as his wheels.
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George Jackson Remembered
14th April 2013
I only ever met George Henry Jackson once, but it was an occasion I’ll never forget. In January 2010 my Ace colleague Dean Rudland and I left our Muscle Shoals hotel in the small hours of the morning, to drive several hundred miles in weather conditions that ‘appalling’ would be far too kind a word to describe, braving snowdrifts and sub-zero temperatures at an ungodly hour to keep a 10AM appointment to interview George and Harrison Calloway at Malaco’s famous Jackson, MS studios. We were nervous and excited at the prospect of meeting a couple of our musical heroes, and the fact that we were a little late in arriving made us even more so – particularly as both men were already sitting in the Malaco lobby waiting for us when we got there.
