(Kent)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
The title is an out-and-out lie. This isn't the definitive anything; it fails to acknowledge the original Impressions and their association with Jerry Butler. It ignores the post-ABC recordings that followed leader Curtis Mayfield's emergence as a serious artist. But it does accidentally offer the ideal cross section of the seminal art-soul act of the '60s, Chicago's Impressions: with a heavy concentration on the first three post-Butler years, thus their most innovative work, it effectively skirts non-Mayfield material while avoiding the most heavy-handed extremes of their work on the Curtom label. All of these chronological ins and outs make the Impressions a notoriously difficult band to compile honestly and pleasingly. This is as even-handed and cohesive a disc of Impressions music as is likely possible.
To me, when I talk about loving them, the Impressions are the group they were from 1961 to 1965. I don't mean to discount Jerry Butler's contributions and the classic "For Your Precious Love," but he would always remain a separate concern from the entity the Impressions became. When Curtis Mayfield -- who was already beginning to compose in Butler's tenure -- took over the mantle, something magic happened, something that even today is scarcely appreciated beyond soul aficianados and record-collecting cultists.
How do you describe "Gypsy Woman" to one unfamiliar? The one faced with such a task has the option to attempt to define it in the safe terms befitting the period and genre, to compare and contrast with touchstones. It can only be ineffective because all points of reference lose their relevance when one is sunk into this brilliantly alien swamp of lust. The spell it casts can't be reduced to words or even to rock & roll terminology -- it's its own experience, and it defines, above all else, the darkest forbidden-fruit extremes of '60s music and popular music as a whole: through and through, it's a dangerous, delightful record.
The big secret is that this -- represented here by roughly fourteen heavenly tracks -- is music of gloriously understated emotional power; nearly every one of these songs, for all their willingness to play the R&B game, packs a shocking wallop, whether in lofty but cleverly contained wall-of-sound production or, more frequently, in the sheer magnificence and nuance of Mayfield's voice.
Mayfield's songs are a case study in themselves, of a form that is inherently sentimental -- popcraft within rhythm and blues and occasionally doo wop -- succumbing to not merely the simulation or duplication of emotion but the most genuine and unfiltered of feeling. The typical wall separating the archetypal singer from his or her audience seems to shrink and disappear when confronted with the purity of these melodies and vocal tics, quirks, liquid passion. His uniquely undisturbed evocation of the church does not merely integrate gospel but transposes it to new surroundings; that defiant waving of what other artists of his stripe and era might define as mere "roots" is a pivotal area of the Impressions' sound, brought in and tampered with unapologetically (rendering it ironic that the most directly religious Impressions record, the Christmas hit "Amen," is maybe their worst); as an ideal example, notice (as you inevitably will!) the sacred undertones and invigorating heights of "Sad, Sad Girl and Boy." The extremes and alarming peaks of the angelic "I'm So Proud" and the structural, aural, vocal eroticism of "I've Been Trying" are even greater. And behind Mayfield lies a nearly imperceptible weapon: the unerring smoothless, calm, confidence (but not soft-rock laziness) in the production, musicianship, and backing vocals -- listen to the low-key pop that retains a knife edge on "Little Young Lover." There is a moving sensibility within the rest of the audible talent of stepping aside for the main event.
For whatever reason, though, it is not the potpourri of varied and layered style and forms of musical bravery that have really provided the Impressions with a legacy. Mayfield's voice -- and what a voice, to be sure -- has proven a profound influence with his unconventional but felt tendency toward a higher-ground countermelody. His effect on, for instance, reggae (but black music in general, really) is as pronounced for sure as Otis Redding's oft-stated claim. And perhaps the Impressions could have explored this world themselves in some parallel universe, if the effortless (and timeless) jazz and rhythm of "Talking About My Baby" is any suggestion.
Yet any attempt to shelve these songs firmly with the sprawling and eclectic remainder of '60s soul reveals a chasm; the early Mayfield sides really sound like almost nothing else, their quirk, trickery, elation, melodic affection a sort of different class that's yet to be tackled again. It's laughable to position them with the rest of the most popular R&B groups of the time, from the Drifters to the Miracles. Above all else, their work bore an artistic conceit, a shying away from pop form and from mass appeal toward bold and starkly expressed, however usually joyous, church-sex music, a refinement and continuation of what the "5" Royales were winding down on when this all began. But the Impressions gain all the more power by being unafraid of minimalism: you might miss that "I'm the One Who Loves You" is as adventurously prophetic a soul song as the '60s gave us because its exhiliration is writ small and contained so masterfully. Never dispassionate, the Impressions still gain heaps of mileage from this tension. And these songs all manage to end well before they could; all are constantly surprising in the least expected ways.
The Impressions peaked in 1964 with the crossover masterpiece "Keep On Pushing," rhythmically, structurally, and thematically a more challenging record than any other of the year, defining the band's teasing innovations and fusions with its provocative "hallelujah" chorus. There are treasures, more pure crafted joy, more almost supernatural hooks and pleasure, more eloquent defiance against a backdrop of troubles, to come after: that minor-key twist in the bridge of "Woman's Got Soul" is to die for. One could be forgiven for getting stuck on the tiny instrumental breaks in nearly all of the Impressions' singles that seem to capture summer, vibrance, life in an unfiltered manner even Motown couldn't rival (a tradition founded with the irresistible closing guitar lick of "Little Young Lover").
Unfortunately, Motown's song-factory grind had a far-reaching effect on R&B radio, for nearly ten years effectively killing the market for soul music without pop trappings. The pleasing part is that Motown's producers, composers, and artists were masters of their craft, ultimately proving themselves more adept at pop than anyone else, except maybe the Beatles (and many times even that was dubious). The downside was that already-accomplished performers like the Impressions and (to a lesser extent) the Isley Brothers derailed their artful purity and career trajectories to attempt records that matched or duplicated the appeal of the Temptations, the Supremes, the Four Tops, and their ilk. Unfortunately, Curtis Mayfield is Curtis Mayfield, not Smokey Robinson; when one attempts to be the other, the result is -- for all its relative success on the charts -- nondescript and basically mediocre.
It's hard not to enjoy popular cuts like "Woman's Got Soul," "You've Been Cheatin'," and "You Always Hurt the One You Love," but hard to really appreciate them as anything but lower-tier Impressions, and pale imitations of ideas and formats carried out far more expertly by others, after the triumphs of this disc's first half. This faltering is tempered by exceptions like "Just One Kiss from You" (the clear inspiration for Feist's "The Limit to Your Love"), floundering into the past with its inventively tense drumming and arrangement.
The fourth and final stage of the Impressions' career is, today, their most famous; the novelty of a polite group of soul men who get radio airplay today alongside the Penguins, the Coasters, the Drifters, and the Marvelettes actually having a radical political streak has managed to overshadow the actual beauty and breathless creativity of the Impressions' early '60s records. It begins all the way back to the smart, wildly unconventional "Minstrel and Queen," sonically a meeting of the Beach Boys (well before anyone knew who they were) and Sam Cooke, lyrically either an alarmingly antiquated fairy tale or a sardonic take on racial tensions. But Curtis Mayfield's message-song agenda truly takes hold auspiciously with the brilliant "Keep On Pushing" and defines itself forever after with 1965's ghostly, evocative "People Get Ready," the most famous Impressions record and Mayfield's most beloved composition.
Allusions to the civil rights battle and pleas for social consciousness have always held a place in rock & roll but Mayfield may have been more explicit than anyone before him outside the folk idiom. It would take him many years to refine his serious-minded lyrics to the point that they left behind simple preaching and became masterful storytelling in their own right -- so many years, in fact, that the Impressions would be long gone by the time it happened. On the way to his ingenious '70s records, he would move his hit machine the Impressions to his own label and attempt -- at times successfully -- to craft political songs for a mass audience. Many of these records have aged poorly, particularly compared -- ironically enough -- to Motown artists Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye's openly left-leaning and beautifully expressive material. But "People Get Ready" has retained its anthemic power in large part because its messages are so elegantly simple, its metaphor of the train that must be boarded and must always move forward so timeless and universal, its feeling of somber but stalwart hope at the very least the equal of Sam Cooke's haunting "A Change Is Gonna Come."
And yet musically, "People Get Ready" already represents a kind of resignation; it is an easier, more conventional song than "A Change Is Gonna Come," barely a year after the Impressions were easily Cooke's equals in musical ambition, and by a longshot less unique and cutting than "Keep On Pushing," like the distance -- for you John Lennon fans -- between the brazen, fiery "Working Class Hero" and the watered-down Muzak of "Imagine." Sure, "People Get Ready" is superior to either of those two Lennon songs, but it's still a step backwards, however a small one, that represents the beginning of a regression.
The explicit nature of Mayfield's lyrics would begin to hurt for a while, but this disc's last three songs -- "We're a Winner," "We're Rolling On," and "I Loved and I Lost" -- capture a good moment, immediatly prior to the departure from ABC-Paramount: Sonically, at laest, they put the group back on the cutting edge and sound of a piece with Mayfield's best solo work.
And Mayfield on his own would turn out to be glorious indeed. But in a sense, something like "Pusherman" ("I'm your doctor when in need / Have some coke, have some weed") could never really top the emotional resonance of the beautiful, to-the-bone brevity of "People Get Ready" ("There's a train a-comin' / You don't need no baggage / You just get on board"). And for me, "People Get Ready" has nothing on the simple, foot-stomping statement of purpose in "It's All Right": "It's all right, have a good time / 'Cause it's all right, whoa, it's all right." That there, that is poetry. Isn't it amazing what maturity can steal from us?
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