Here’s a song from Bob Dylan’s great 1997 album Time Out of Mind, a “comeback” record that earned him the Album of the Year Grammy. Amazingly, this is the only Dylan release to ever win Grammy’s top honor.
‘Standing in the Doorway’ is a highlight of this elegiac album. It’s about the end of a relationship, but like most songs on Time Out of Mind, it feels like it’s just as much about the end of life.
Closing out my three weeks on the albums of 1974 is Barry White’s Can’t Get Enough. This was White’s third album and his only one to top the Billboard 200.
Between 1973 and 1975, White released his first four albums and saw every one top the R&B chart. Six of the 10 albums he released in the 70s did so, and nine of the 10 went Gold or Platinum.
Five months ago, while writing about the latest additions to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry, I confessed that I didn’t know ‘Lady Marmalade’ was a cover (I know the song through its inclusion in the 2001 film Moulin Rouge).
In fact, it was a hit R&B song by Labelle, a band fronted by Patti LaBelle.
Well, this week Labelle makes another appearance thanks to their 1974 album Nightbirds, on which ‘Lady Marmalade’ is the opening track.
I was impressed by the 60 studio albums released by James Brown over the course of his career. Well, Willie Nelson makes Brown look like a slacker.
Nelson has released a whopping 95 studio albums, including 75 solo records and 20 in collaboration with others. That’s an average of one and a half albums per year for nearly 60 years! And I’m not including live albums or soundtracks.
Sticking to funk for another day, here’s a 1974 album by the genre’s signature artist, James Brown.
Hell is a wild Frankenstein creation, a double album that features remakes of previous hits, some smooth R&B, a Spanish-language detour, and unlikely covers of ‘Stormy Monday’ and ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ Plus a number of songs, such as today’s SOTD, that embrace Brown’s signature sound.
