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.
I’ve covered a lot of legendary artists over the past two weeks, while featuring albums released in 1974 as part of my ‘Decades’ series.
Today’s song, by contrast, comes from a band I’d never heard of before now.
The Meters are a New Orleans funk band that recorded from the late 60s through the late 70s. They weren’t as popular as contemporaries like James Brown but were quite influential in their own right.
Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen released his fourth studio album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, in 1974. It was a continuation of the spare, elegiac style of his first three releases, though he did introduce new instruments to the mix.
I’m familiar with Cohen more through his reputation than his music. The only full album of his I’ve owned is 1992’s The Future, a gloriously dark and apocalyptic record. Of course I know ‘Hallelujah,’ his most beloved (and at this point, overexposed) song, and a smattering of other singles (‘Suzanne,’ ‘Everybody Knows’).
Elton John is yet another legendary artist to release an album in 1974. That release was Caribou, which went double platinum and reached #1 on the albums chart (a feat matched by only four other John records).
It’s also, by all accounts, not very good.
Recorded in just nine days to free John up for a world tour, Caribou is a redheaded stepchild among his run of classic albums in the early to mid 70s.
Meet Me In Montauk 