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The Isley Brothers - 1971 - Givin' It Back
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The Isley Brothers - 1971 - Givin' It Back
Tracks : 1 Ohio/Machine Gun 2 Fire and Rain 3 Lay Lady Lay 4 Spill the Wine 5 Nothing to Do but Today 6 Cold Bologna 7 Love the One You're With
Givin' It Back is as much a time capsule as an album. Not that it
can't be enjoyed on its own absolute musical terms by someone just off
a boat who wasn't even around in 1971, but to really appreciate how
daring it was and how delightful it is, that side of its history should
be known. Those who are old enough should recall the time whence it
came, an era in which hatred and disunity over the Vietnam War, civil
rights, school desegregation, the environment, and a multitude of other
issues were threatening what seemed, potentially, like the beginning of
a new civil war, this one not between states but between factions and
ethnic and racial groups in 1,000 individual neighborhoods. The opening
cut of Givin' It Back, "Ohio/Machine Gun," is a slap-in-your-face
reminder of just how angry the times and the people were. The track
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. More than
that, the track itself is also a reminder of the divisions that existed
on the left; to listen to pundits on the right, the anti-war and civil
rights movements, along with the counterculture, were all part of one
vast, organized, calculated left-wing conspiracy. The truth is that
there was nearly as big a 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. Blacks reacting to years of
oppression had little use for mostly middle-class white college
students, however sympathetic many of them purported to be to their
situation, while well-meaning white students and activists couldn't
begin to know what privation of the kind experienced by blacks and
Hispanics in most American towns and cities was. In music, too, there
was a lot of division; blacks usually didn't resonate to the top
artists in the white world and, in particular, were oblivious to (and
even resentful of) the adoration accorded Jimi Hendrix by the white
community. So, when the Isley Brothers -- whose appeal among black
audiences was unimpeachable -- opened Givin' It Back with a conflation
of Neil Young's "Ohio" and Jimi Hendrix's "Machine Gun," they 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. That they 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. Givin' It Back is filled with
virtues of that kind, however; it was the first Isley Brothers album to
rely entirely on outside material, but the group's reworkings of songs
by James Taylor ("Fire and Rain") and Stephen Stills ("Love the One
You're With") show no lack of originality. They're unafraid to take the
song apart and rebuild it from the ground up, smoothing Bob Dylan's
"Lay Lady Lay" into a sensual soul ballad, turning the James Taylor
number into a sweaty, earnest shouter, and transforming War's "Spill
the Wine" into an extended workout for voices, electric guitars
(several layers deep), flute, and percussion. The album was also an
early showcase for Bill Withers, whose funky blues "Cold Bologna" is
covered by the group with the composer -- who was about to emerge as a
major star in his own right -- on guitar. And the closer, "Love the One
You're With," is sent soaring to heights that the Stephen Stills
original could only gaze up at. Givin' It Back is often held at arm's
length by soul listeners, who don't regard it as central to what the
Isley Brothers or their music are about; on the contrary, the group is
so successful at remaking all of the songs here their own in style and
approach and sending careful messages (alas, largely lost with the
passage of time) in their selection as well as their content, that it
really represents a lot of what the Isley Brothers and soul music were
about in 1971, and it's still great listening. Reissued in 1997 by Sony
with new notes, and worth every cent of its list price.