La Musica en Verite: The Isley Brothers

Introducing "Givin' It Back", the first Isley Brother album entirely made with outside material. Even if t is often regarded by soul listeners as album which is not central to what Isley Brothers or their music are about, It really represents what Isley Brother and soul music was in 1971. The album is stunning because they are really succesfull at remarking all the songs with their own approach. They also include plenty of carefull messages that are describing the political context of the time.

The album starts with "Ohio Machine Gun" which is a mix of Neil Young 's Ohio and Jimi Hendrix's Machine Gun. A slap-in-your-face reminder of just how angry the times and the people were.

The Isley Brothers - Ohio Machine Gun

The Neil Young's track "Ohio", evokes instant memories of the campus bloodshed of 1970, not just at Kent State but also the often-forgotten killings a few days later at Jackson State University in Mississippi, where the victims of a fusillade of sheriff's deputies' bullets were black students.

Neil Young - Ohio

Jimi Hendrix's track "Machine Gun", is a protest to to Vietnam War and perhaps a broader comment on conflict of any kind. The song was orignally recorded on the Band of Gypsy's Live released in 1970. You can hear the drum and the guitar effects reproducing gun shots in an amazing way. (I will be posting this album in the blog soon) it is supposed to be of the most beautful version.

It is interesting to discover that the song is on the supposed fourth Hendrix album which was released after his death by Alan Douglas who heavily edited the version bringing other musicians to finish the album. It has never been well received by fans who are still waiting for the unaltered studio version since the Hendrix estate gained control on his recording in 1995 . Douglas was a record producer who met Jimi during the last two years of his life. When Jimi died, Douglas approached the manager Mike Jeffrey with a view to taking artistic control of the catalogue. Jeffrey refused, but when Jeffrey died in an air crash in 1973, Douglas met with more success dealing with the new estate authority Leo Branton who knew an awful lot about business but nothing about the music. For the next twenty years, until August 1995, not a single item of legitimate Hendrix product was released without Douglas's say-so.

Jimi Hendrix - Machine Gun

Back to the Isley Brother and "Givin' it back!"
It is said that the track is also a reminder to the division on the political left. According to experts of the right, the anti-war and civil rights movements of the left, along with the counterculture, were all part of one vast, organized, calculated left-wing conspiracy. The truth is that there was nearly a big split culturally and politically, between young blacks and young whites on the left and on college campuses as there was anywhere else in the population.

Well-meaning white students and activists where oppressed and started to empathy the oppresion the blacks were living for years. But young whites couldn't know what was privation of the kind experienced by blacks and Hispanics in most American towns and cities...and

There was a lot of division in music too, blacks were not resonating to the top artists in the white world, with one exception of Jimmy Hendrix being adored by the white audience.

With Givin' It Back , the Isley brothers were speaking to anger and bloodshed in the streets, but they were also performing an act of outreach that was about as radical as any they could have committed on record in 1971. They even incorporated a prayer into their reformulation of the two songs, amid Ernie Isley's and Chester Woodard's guitar pyrotechnics, turned it into one of the most powerful and personal musical statements of its era, and it's worth the price of the album just for the one cut.

On the album you will also find a cover of Bob Dylan "Lay Lady Lay" and James Taylor's "Fire and Rain "

The Isley Bothers - Lay Lady Lay