Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth 9781501355509, 9781501355530, 9781501355523

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GHETTO: MISFORTUNE’S WEALTH Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch . . . The series . . . is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice A brilliant series . . . each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK) We . . . aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . . . watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33‒” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

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Forthcoming in the series: Band of Gypsys by Michael E. Veal Timeless by Martyn Deykers Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 by Colin Fleming Once Upon a Time by Alex Jeffery Tapestry by Loren Glass Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik The Archandroid by Alyssa Favreau Avalon by Simon Morrison Rio by Annie Zaleski Vs. by Clint Brownlee xx by Jane Morgan and many more. . .

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Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth

Zach Schonfeld

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Copyright © Zach Schonfeld, 2021 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 143 constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data. Names: Schonfeld, Zach, author. Title: Ghetto : misfortune’s wealth / Zach Schonfeld. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Series: 33 1/3 ; 152 | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “The story of the high-concept funk-rock opera that flopped and fell into obscurity only to become a remarkably popular source of rap samples and breakbeats”–Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020029908 (print) | LCCN 2020029909 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501355509 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501355516 (epub) | ISBN 9781501355523 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: 24-Carat Black (Musical group). Ghetto. | Funk (Music)–History and criticism. | Sampling (Sound)–History. Classification: LCC ML421.A12 S3 2020 (print) | LCC ML421.A12 (ebook) | DDC 781.643—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029908 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029909 ISBN:

PB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-5013-5550-9 978-1-5013-5552-3 978-1-5013-5551-6

Series: 3313Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents

Author’s Note

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Introduction: Synopsis

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1 2 3 4 5

The Story of the Ghetto In the Ghetto Rebirth Gone Poverty’s Paradise

9 59 79 109 123

Epilogue

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Acknowledgments Notes

143 147

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Author’s Note

All quotes in this book, unless otherwise stated, are from interviews conducted by the author between July 2018 and December 2019. Several quotes and ideas expressed in this book first appeared in a Pitchfork article, titled “24-Carat Black Were Sampled by Pusha-T, Kendrick Lamar, Nas, JAY-Z—And They’re Still Broke,” written and reported by the author in 2018.

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Introduction Synopsis Ishmael Butler first heard it when he was a kid: the apocalyptic funk of 24-Carat Black. It was the 1970s. Butler’s father, a history professor in Virginia, routinely brought home avant-jazz and soul LPs of the day, exposing his son to heady Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders titles before he was old enough to drive.1 The man’s tastes ran far afield of the mainstream. In fact, he had all sorts of vinyl gems stacked next to the hi-fi in the living room, from bebop greats like Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk, to what Butler describes as funky jazz—“Lonnie Liston Smith, cats on CTI, Bitches Brew.” You can sense an emphasis on African-American visionaries and eccentrics. Somewhere in his record collection was an impossibly bleak concept album called Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth. It was the only album released by a group called 24-Carat Black. Even the inky-black cover art—a skeletal half-shadow of a face—seemed submerged in impenetrable darkness. The music carried a similar pall of heaviness. Ghetto, which had been released on Stax Records’ Enterprise label in 1973, paired hard grooves with unflinching soliloquies about poverty, hunger, and Vietnam-era urban despair. It contained 1

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no love songs, no party anthems, no “Let’s Get It On,” certainly no hits. Instead, Ghetto offered a gloomy yet astonishingly funky conceptual suite examining lower-class struggle in the inner city. The tracks were long and, from Stax’s perspective, not easily marketable. The album’s cinematic expanse of sorrow bewildered radio DJs and had no real antecedent. “It’s the only record that sounds even remotely close to this on any of the Stax labels,” says Jeff Kollath, executive director of the Stax Museum (the nation’s only museum where you can grab a copy of Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth in the gift shop). By any commercial measure, it was a flop. Butler knew none of that. He just knew this album was . . . well, different: a funk-soul concept album at a time when concept albums weren’t made by Black R&B groups. His father played it often. “When I was young, I heard the album a lot,” Butler says. “I always liked the group. The drummer was ridiculous. As I got older, my impression of it was, damn, this shit is really good—and really on the vanguard and outside the normal approach to R&B.” He was intrigued. Even the titular wordplay seemed charged with meaning. “The name was always right to me: 24-Carat Black. That was a slick use of words and imagery that evoked something ancient, mysterious, dark, bright.” The band, a kind of collective of virtuosic Black teenagers and twenty-somethings molded and directed by the classically trained Stax arranger Dale Warren—who largely wrote and arranged Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth himself—failed to find success. Then came Stax’s financial collapse. Abandoned by its 2

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label and ignored by audiences, 24-Carat Black petered out, never managing to complete another album. By the late 1970s, Stax had folded, the band had dissolved, and their sole album had slid into bargain-bin obscurity. And that is where it would have remained, if not for hip-hop. In 1992, Butler was no longer a kid. He was “Butterfly,” leader of the jazz-rap trio Digable Planets. That year he dug through his father’s records, unearthed the 24-Carat Black LP, and nabbed a drum sample for Digable Planets’ surprise hit “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat).” “All the records I sampled during that time I had basically stolen from my mom and dad’s collections,” Butler admits. And he wasn’t the only one exhuming this particular record. Two years earlier, Eric B. & Rakim had used a 24-Carat Black vocal hook on their song “In the Ghetto.” In future decades, the band’s music would surface on tracks by RZA, Kendrick Lamar, Jill Scott, and countless others. And so this story is not merely about one funk group, but also a microhistory of sampling through the lens of one album that has been sampled so many times it’s now embedded in the soul of 1990s rap. For those unfamiliar with the term, I’ll define sampling, as authors Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola do in their book Creative License, as “a technique that incorporates portions of existing sound recordings into a newly collaged composition.”2 The isolated fragment of preexisting music (perhaps a drum beat, or a vocal hook) is called a sample. And the DJs who hunt for those musical fragments are often called “crate-diggers,” because they spend so much time digging through crates of vinyl records. 3

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Sampling isn’t just a hip-hop invention. The Beatles manipulated tape loops on “Revolution 9” more than fifty years ago. Brian Eno and David Byrne sampled from bizarre and spooky sources, such as an exorcism, on their 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. But hip-hop revolutionized sampling and introduced it into mainstream culture, as early rap DJs rebelled against traditional methods of music-making by manipulating old songs into new breakbeats. Rock purists sometimes look down on sampling, or consider it stealing. This is ignorant, but I get it: if your primary exposure to the technique is Vanilla Ice nabbing the bassline from “Under Pressure,” it does seem lazy. But at its best, sampling is a complex and skillful art. During the late 1980s, a string of mind-bending rap albums, including De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising (which creates a psychedelic stew from such unlikely sources as a French instructional recording) and Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, elevated sampling to new heights of sophistication. As McLeod and DiCola write, Public Enemy “would graft together dozens of fragmentary samples to create a single song collage,” in which preexisting samples were often rendered unrecognizable.3 Contrary to charges of laziness, this work required hundreds of hours of cratedigging, listening, and sonic layering. It was this era of creativity that led to 24-Carat Black’s resurrection. Suddenly, as rap producers began pillaging 1970s soul in search of funky vibes and tight drum sounds, 24-Carat Black’s long-forgotten grooves became sample manna. Their album didn’t die so much as mutate into a sort 4

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of à-la-carte funk-loop database for savvy rap producers, who wanted something fresh instead of the millionth James Brown sample. Ghetto became an underground classic, a holy grail record, the rare revolutionary artifact appreciated only by future generations. And yet the group’s musicians still languish in cultural obscurity. Nor have they been financially compensated for their music’s vast influence on hip-hop. As I would sometimes tell people at parties while writing this book, Ghetto is an album that nobody has heard of but everybody has heard. And that’s only kind of an exaggeration. I first decided to dig into the strange and untold story of 24-Carat Black during the summer of 2018, shortly after hearing Pusha T’s album Daytona, which had been produced by Kanye West. It was “Infrared”—the album’s terse, unsettled closing track—that caught my ear. Most critics took notice of the song because its lyrics ignited a messy feud with Drake. I was more intrigued by the woozy, disembodied vocal snippet that loops throughout the song, like a ghostly record skip repeating in perpetuity. The sample primarily consists of an androgynous voice muttering seven words—“Infrared . . . yeah . . . you know what I mean?”—which are set to repeat over and over. It sounded like a remarkably expressive song particle, and I wanted to hear more. After a few minutes of googling, I learned that the song West had sampled was 24-Carat Black’s “I Want to Make Up,” an eerie, pleading ballad that appeared on a compilation of the group’s unfinished recordings released by the archival label Numero Group. I knew that the band’s only proper 5

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album, Ghetto, had been sampled dozens of times, and I found the music brilliant and captivating. But I knew only bits and pieces of the group’s backstory. I began tracking down and interviewing the surviving members of 24-Carat Black for a piece that was later published on Pitchfork. I was astonished by the depth and richness of their stories, accounts of hope and struggle set against the historic backdrop of Stax’s slow-motion decline. I was also struck (though not exactly surprised) by their inability to profit from music that has spent three decades infiltrating rap production like some secret ingredient of undiluted funk. I believed their plight illustrated larger truths about the music industry. And I was surprised that so little had been written about them previously. Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth is not, I realize, a typical album to write a book about. Its influence is largely invisible. It never sold ten million copies. It doesn’t show up on Rolling Stone lists of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Its release did not generate long-form profiles in glossy magazines. It is probably not an album you grew up listening to (unless, of course, you are Ishmael Butler). At the time of writing, it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia entry. But beyond being a genuine lost classic—the sort of album that’s sought by record collectors with the determination of Indiana Jones seeking the Ark of the Covenant—it is also an album whose surreal backstory elucidates so many mystifying corners of the music industry, including (but not limited to) the mercurial currents of the 1970s soul scene, the artistic and legal dimensions of sampling, the creative limits placed on Black ambition in the Nixon era, as well as thornier 6

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notions of exploitation and cultural rebirth. The album is legendary, yet its story has been shrouded in deep mystery for forty-seven years. I hope that this book—an account of 24-Carat Black’s story rooted in dozens of interviews with the people who lived it—will help lift that mystery. At the very least, I hope it will shine some long-overdue journalistic light on an oft-forgotten artifact from a visionary era. And, not insignificantly, I hope it will bring some recognition to the remarkable musicians whose work has gone unsung and uncompensated for nearly half a century. As C. Niambi Steele, one of the group’s vocalists, recently told me: “You’re writing a book about a skeleton!” I asked what she meant. “We’re all bones now,” Steele said. “I don’t know anybody that’s performing but me and [lead singer] Princess. A lot of us are dead. You know how sad that is? It’s so sad because we all had dreams. And the album is now called a classic—but who are we? That’s what I struggle with. If this is a classic, then who am I?” For decades, admirers of Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth— producers, crate-diggers, soul aficionados, people who stumbled upon it God-knows-where—have wondered the same: Who made this music? What happened to them? I hope this book provides an answer.

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1 The Story of the Ghetto They called themselves the Ditalians, and for a brief, magical spell, they were the best high school band around Cincinnati. “We were the hottest band to hire,” says drummer Tyrone Steels. “Cuz when we came to play for you, we had a ten-piece band.” Indeed, as the band graduated from talent show curiosity to formidable show band, it dazzled audiences with an ever-expanding lineup, which at one point included two drummers, seven backup vocalists (one female contingent and one male), one MC, and a six-piece horn section.4 This is the band that would eventually morph into 24-Carat Black. Yet it would take many years, several lineup shifts, and—most crucially—the arrival of an eccentric interlocutor to get there. In the beginning, it was just four friends attending Sawyer Junior High in Cincinnati: Steels, James “Sonny” Talbert, Larry Cottrell, and his brother Willie Cottrell (later credited as Billy Best). The group formed in 1965, a huge year for Motown, with the Supremes launching to worldwide stardom and sugary soul-pop gems like the Temptations’ “My Girl” and Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey 9

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Bunch)” ruling the airwaves. Like thousands of other Black teenagers, the Ditalians were inspired. “We were in our early teens,” Steels tells me. “We were crazy about music. We would go home and listen to Motown and all the stuff coming out of the South. So we said, ‘Let’s start a band.’ ” The group’s main hangout spot was a record store owned by a man named Bobby Jarrell, whom the teens suspected might have some industry connections. Jarrell took an interest in the Ditalians and became their first manager. “That’s when the group really became a group,” Steels says. “He started booking us gigs at nightclubs throughout Cincinnati and Kentucky. We were young. Some of them clubs we weren’t supposed to be playing at. But he got us in there.” Now with four male vocalists (including Willie Cottrell), the group refined its chops and became a mainstay at local talent shows. Soon they befriended the owner of a local tuxedo business—supplier of their stage outfits—who introduced them to NBA star Oscar Robertson, a player for the Cincinnati Royals. Robertson was impressed and, surprisingly, decided to bankroll the young group.5 With his help, the Ditalians landed a small-scale record deal with a local label called Saxony Records. Saxony arranged a recording session in Nashville for the group’s four vocalists, who were backed not by their own band, but instead Nashville session players. “And lo and behold, guess who produced those songs?” Steels says. “Dale Warren!” Indeed, in a startling bit of foreshadowing, a twentythree-year-old Warren crossed paths with the Ditalians years 10

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before he would mold the group into his visionary art-funk ensemble. According to Steels, the singers returned from the session raving to him, “Man, this guy named Dale—this guy was unbelievable.” Yet these early recordings, while appealing, bore no resemblance to the future 24-Carat Black. The jovial call-and-response soul of “Philly Dog New Breed” is a galaxy removed from 24-Carat Black’s “Poverty’s Paradise.” Besides, the Ditalians’ stage show was centered around upbeat covers, not scorching soliloquies. “We were a local party band,” says saxophonist Jerome Derrickson, who joined around 1968. “We were playing dance music—Motown songs, like ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.’ We weren’t focused on singing like on Ghetto, where you hear us talking about food stamps or you hear the baby crying.” After the session with Warren, Saxony issued three original tracks by the Ditalians. “They did real well regionally in Cincinnati,” Steels says. “Philly Dog New Breed” even became a local hit and, in late 1966, landed the group a write-up in the Cincinnati Enquirer, which described it as “[a] swinging new record currently being plugged by WCIN.”6 But national success was elusive. And Saxony Records was not long for this world. Meanwhile, the band grew better and better. A six-piece horn section joined. “Aw man, we were really big,” Steels says. “We started performing at dances, weddings, schools, proms. We got our name known around Cincinnati. You had a revue when you hired us! And we were gigging every weekend.” Sonny Talbert’s mother, Virginia Talbert—whose other son, Billy, had joined as keyboardist—became the Ditalians’ manager and arranged for them to record new demos to 11

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shop around. They landed a short-lived record deal with Mercury Records.* Around 1968, the group scored an even better asset in the form of three powerhouse young vocalists: Princess Hearn, just fourteen; Patricia Hearn, her sixteen-year-old sister; and their classmate Kathleen Dent. The Ditalians had encountered the girls at a high school talent show and quickly poached them. “They wanted Princess ’cause she could sing,” says Patricia, who now goes by P. Ann Everson-Price. “We were like, ‘If you don’t take all three of us, you don’t get her.’” They took all three. Princess could work a crowd singing Aretha Franklin songs, and the Ditalians became more popular than ever. The Hearn sisters, it turned out, had an older brother named Clarence Campbell, who was in his thirties and lived in Michigan. Campbell had some contacts in the music industry—and he would do anything to help his little sisters. “I just had so much love for my family,” Campbell explains, “and they have so much talent.” In time, Campbell would reintroduce the Ditalians to the man who would rewrite their destiny. His name was Dale Warren. Here is what we know for sure about Dale Ossman Warren: (1) He was a musical genius. (2) He drank. A lot. Anyone who knew Warren invariably mentions one or the other—the brilliance, the boozing. Usually both. Which is *Mercury issued a 45 under the name “Billy Best and the Ditalians.” According to Willie Cottrell’s son, Tony Cottrell, the singer never actually chose the “Billy Best” nickname: “That name was given to him by Mercury Records.”

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not to suggest that they were related. But nor did one sabotage the other. He was, in modern parlance, a high-functioning alcoholic. “He never went anywhere without his bottle of Beefeater,” says Warren’s daughter, Tori Gray. “[But] if it wasn’t for him turning the bottle up, you would never know he had been drinking. He never reeked of it. He always smelled like Brut Cologne. And he was very, very functional.” In Soulsville, U.S.A., Rob Bowman’s epic Stax biography, Isaac Hayes describes Warren walking into sessions “with a bottle of gin in his back pocket.”7 That was the rule, not the exception. “If we had a recording session, he was going to be drinking,” says Everson-Price. “That Beefeater gin—that was his ‘do-it’ fluid. The more he drank, the more he created. And the more he created, the more he drank.” It wasn’t the usual debauchery. Warren wasn’t a partier. He was an introvert. The alcohol helped him to be around other people, says his longtime music copyist and protégé, Vicki Gray. “And then, after a while, it just became the crutch.” Now about the genius part. As a classically trained arranger for Motown Records, and later its Memphis-based competitor, Stax, Warren was one of the invisible architects of ambitious 1960s soul. His ear was remarkable. “He could write for a full orchestra without ever touching the keyboard,” says Vicki. “Everything was in his head. Which was pretty darn amazing.” “I thought Dale was pure genius,” says Shakir Suleiman, a member of 24-Carat Black’s second lineup. “He would bring me music. In the middle of the night. We would sit up and talk over the sheet music. I could see he had his heart inside of that music.” 13

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Warren was born into a musical family in 1943, the son of a concert pianist father and the nephew of Raynoma Gordy Singleton, who would become a crucial figure in the early history of Motown, the pioneering soul label founded by her then-husband, Berry Gordy. Nepotism surely helped his career along, but it wasn’t fronting for a lack of talent. At the age of eight, after seeing the legendary violinist David Oistrakh perform with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, he asked his mother for a violin. She bought him one. By twelve, he was writing music.8 By his early teens, according to Numero Group’s research, Warren was “a confirmed violin, cello, and piano prodigy,” spending his high school years performing in professional symphonies around his native Detroit.9 He was not born into the sort of abject poverty that Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth chronicles, but that doesn’t mean his childhood was easy. His parents were staunch Jehovah’s Witnesses. “He had to deal with going door-knocking,” says Vicki. “He immersed himself in his music.” In 1961, Warren, just eighteen, landed a gig at Motown as a staff arranger. Three years later, after Raynoma and Berry had split, his aunt hired him at Shrine, the short-lived label she formed with third husband Eddie Singleton. “Ray kept us busy,” says Warren’s collaborator Robert Manchurian. “We were like turning out cars on an assembly line!” “Dale was a terrific violin player, could write and arrange for strings, and was versed in the language of classical music,” Gordy Singleton would write in her 1990 memoir, which describes her nephew as a “violin genius.”10 Indeed, even as his family connections steered him towards the epicenter of American soul, Warren remained firm in his devotion to 14

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classical music: here was an eccentric whose idea of a side hustle was guest-conducting a symphony. Naturally, that pedigree infiltrated his work as an arranger. His compositions had a flair for the dramatic. “He took classical music and turned it into commercial music,” Vicki says. She cites Smokey Robinson’s circus-like hit “The Tears of a Clown”: “He fought to put the calliope in it, because it would create the ambience required for people to feel the circus,” Vicki says. Warren became a prolific arranger, dabbling with a variety of soul labels, including Calla, where he arranged Bettye LaVette’s 1965 hit “Let Me Down Easy.” During his Shrine tenure, Stax— which had been launched out of a garage in 1957 by a white bank employee named Jim Stewart—emerged as the Southern soul answer to Berry Gordy’s hit factory. It was the scrappier, grittier rival, its mid-sixties rise buoyed by the scorching pipes of signature star Otis Redding. As Rufus Thomas once put it: “Motown had the sweet, but Stax had the funk.”11 Indeed, Stax executives favored Black authenticity over crossover appeal— and Stewart, writes Bowman, “was always loudly championing keeping the company’s sound as ‘Black’ as possible.”12 But when Warren arrived at Stax in the late 1960s, the label was in crisis. Its marquee act, Redding, had perished in a plane crash. Months later, Stewart severed Stax’s distribution deal with Atlantic Records and was stunned to discover that, due to an obscure ownership clause he had never read, Atlantic would retain the rights to Stax’s entire song catalog. It was an inconceivable betrayal. Stax could no longer profit from its own legacy.13 Stax executive Al Bell, a hip-talking former disc jockey soon to become co-owner of the label, had a wild solution: 15

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build an entire new catalog from scratch. Bell ordered Stax artists to get to work, plunging the label into creative madness, with the goal of releasing twenty-eight new albums and thirty singles in mid-1969. Of the dozens of LPs that materialized, one sailed above the rest: Isaac Hayes’s astonishing Hot Buttered Soul, the centerpiece of which, a breathtaking, twelve-minute annihilation of the Burt Bacharach standard “Walk On By,” featured orchestral arrangements by Warren. The album sold more than a million copies and transformed the bald-headed singer into Stax’s sexy, velvet-voiced icon. It was Bell who had spotted Hayes’s star potential when he was working as an in-house songwriter and studio musician for Stax. “I knew Isaac was rare,” Bell says. “I would watch him when he went into the small clubs in Memphis and performed. I called him the pimp and the preacher. He wasn’t the most handsome guy in the world. But Isaac would get on the keyboards and get to rocking and talking and singing his songs. And by the time Isaac left, there were two or three girls leaving with Isaac. I was like, ‘Wow. This guy has magic in him.’ ” The singer’s first album, Presenting Isaac Hayes, didn’t ignite. But Hot Buttered Soul changed everything. The Hayes phenomenon was so intense, Bell claims, people were breaking into stores just to steal Soul. “I had every radio promotion person working for every company in this industry getting in touch with me, wanting a copy of that record and running around telling radio stations about it,” Bell tells me. “I’ve never had that experience before or since then.” 16

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The explosion of Hot Buttered Soul paved the way for Ghetto in more ways than one. For one thing, it gave Warren the cachet to turn his loftiest visions into reality. “He got carte blanche in the studio and a budget to back him,” writes Numero Group co-founder Rob Sevier.14 In the grander scheme, Hayes’s album ushered in a new era in which LPs by Black musical artists were regarded—and marketed—as a serious art form, rather than just a tossed-off repository of singles. “Hot Buttered Soul unquestionably proved that Black artists could sell LPs,” Bowman writes, “and singlehandedly revolutionized the notion of the length and musical palette appropriate for Black artists.”15 Groundbreaking releases by Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, and others soon followed—all doing their part to expand the potential of the Black LP in the pop imagination. In other words, before Soul, the notion that an ambitious R&B album with an average track length of eleven minutes could sell a million copies was absurd. After Soul, anything seemed possible—even a soul-funk concept album about poverty. Warren remained closely associated with Hayes for years, arranging two 1970 follow-up records, The Isaac Hayes Movement and . . . To Be Continued. Vicki Gray claims he also contributed—possibly as a ghostwriter—to Hayes’s wildly successful Shaft soundtrack, with its wah-wah-toting title theme.* This is questionable: Warren’s name appears *It’s worth noting that Warren’s aunt’s autobiography claims he was “the visionary arranger on Isaac Hayes’s ‘Shaft.’” But she may have been confusing “Theme From Shaft” (which was credited to Johnny Allen) with “Walk On By.”

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nowhere in the LP’s credits. But, says Gray, “I know he did [Shaft]. I used to write his music. I know his signatures.” In 1971, Cash Box announced that Warren had been signed to a long-term, exclusive contract with Stax.16 Bell recognized Warren’s skill and put him to work with a variety of Stax acts, from swing-era star Billy Eckstine to the Staple Singers, whom Bell was nudging beyond their gospel-folk roots. “They were considered a gospel act,” Bell recalls. “To me, the Staples were much, much bigger than that.” On a 1971 album called The Staple Swingers, Bell put this theory to the test. “The person I knew could really take it and put the kind of orchestration around it that accomplished what I wanted to accomplish was Dale Warren,” Bell says. “From that point forward, I got locked into him and we got locked into each other. And all of that locked-into is reflected in 24-Carat Black.” For years, Warren harbored dreams of a high-concept musical undertaking fusing his dual interests in classical composition and modern soul music. One day, an acquaintance, Clarence Campbell, told him about a talented young group called the Ditalians. Campbell brought Warren to Cincinnati to see the twelve-piece band rehearse at Virginia Talbert’s house. “You could see it in his face,” Steels recalls. “It was like, ‘Yep. That’s what I was looking for.’ ” Later, Warren watched the band perform at a frat party at the University of Michigan. Nobody knows when exactly. 1969? 1970? Details are fuzzy. What we do know is that Warren was profoundly moved by the group’s overflowing skill. “When [Warren] witnessed the Ditalians on stage at an Ann Arbor frat party,” writes Sevier, “he saw the fruition of his soul-suite vision on display 18

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before him.”17 Warren decided to take the musicians under his wing and train them anew. Clarence Campbell can still picture Dale Warren driving around town in his red 1959 Pontiac. But he’s tired of Warren receiving all the credit for 24-Carat Black’s conception. “I introduced the whole group to him!” Campbell exclaims. “Dale was not putting up all the money. Dale didn’t have no money! Me and Virginia Talbert—we nickeled up and we came up with all the money.” Campbell is eighty-two, a sharply dressed man with a bald head and a booming, authoritative voice. He was born and raised in Alabama, and you can hear it when he speaks. Periodically, he thumps my knee when he wants to emphasize a point. 24-Carat Black was a family affair for him—his little sisters were the singers, his soon-to-be brother-in-law the leader. And he always speaks his mind, especially when he feels his family has been cheated. We’re sitting in Campbell’s living room, in the Ann Arbor home he built in 1970. There’s a mahogany piano in the corner, its fallboard shut tight and cluttered with a row of holiday cards from his grandchildren. In an opposite corner is a great glass cabinet filled with wooden dolls, all AfricanAmerican girls. Princess Hearn, Campbell’s little sister, sits on a couch across from us, wearing a black Stax Records t-shirt and magenta-dyed hair. At one point, Campbell retreats to a storage space—where he claims to have “millions of dollars’ worth” of masters—and returns with an original pressing of Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth, placing the tattered black cardboard on a glass table. 19

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“It all started right here,” Campbell says. In fact, this is the same room where Warren conjured the name “24-Carat Black” in 1972 or ’73. In Campbell’s recollection, the album had already been recorded, and though the band had been going as the Ditalians for years, Warren believed it needed a new name to signal the new direction. As for the inspiration for the moniker he chose, “I’m not gonna sit here and lie. I’m not really sure,” Campbell says. “I just remember Dale and I, we was kicking some names around, and he said, ‘24-Carat Black’”— obviously a play on 24-carat (or karat) gold. The name stuck.* “He just came in one day and said he wanted to change the name to 24-Carat Black,” confirms Derrickson. “And we were OK with it.” According to the liner notes for Gone: The Promises of Yesterday, Warren chose the name to reflect “the theme of his creation: Black culture as a misunderstood treasure.”18 The name would prove prophetic—both because the group’s music and presentation was unapologetically Black, and because Ghetto really has become a lost treasure. In those early days, Campbell and Warren were partners, jointly managing the group along with Virginia Talbert. The three drew up a managerial contract. “Our little slogan was TCW: Talbert, Campbell, and Warren,” says Campbell. “We *This seems as good a place as any to note that “24-Carat Black” and “The 24-Carat Black” were used somewhat interchangeably during the band’s brief existence. The original cover of Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth is stylized in the latter fashion. However, virtually all contemporary references to the group—including the 1994 CD release of Ghetto—have dropped the “The,” so that’s the style I’ve chosen to adopt for this book. Like many aspects of the group’s story, the discrepancy is a bit of a mystery. Steels does not know when or why “The 24-Carat Black” became “24-Carat Black.”

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had a percentage. We had it all worked out on paper.” As proof, he produces some yellowing stationary with the official letterhead; “TCW” appears in red block letters, next to Warren’s home address. Within two years, the partnership would sour, Campbell and Warren’s relationship disintegrating along with it. Campbell’s main gripe is that he fronted the first few thousand dollars to cover 24-Carat Black’s recording sessions, yet never received his cut of the record deal, nor any royalties. “I spent a lot of money and I haven’t received a dime,” Campbell protests. Later he adds: “Dale was smart. But Dale was a real good con man. I’m not gonna sugarcoat it—he took advantage. And his own daddy told me that his son Dale would not do right.” During my visit, Campbell drives me out to Ypsilanti to see Warren’s old home. As we survey the red, ranch-style house where the arranger lived with his wife, Bonnie, and their young son, Campbell is still grumbling about that long-ago betrayal. “We were the managers, and everything was spelled out,” he tells me. “It was all laid out just right. When the deal went down, it didn’t go that way. That’s when I found out—hell, I got in bed with a crook!” The details of when and how Warren first conceived of the 24-Carat Black album remain shrouded in a curtain of mystery, which, given his premature death, is unlikely to lift. According to Bowman’s 1994 reissue liner notes, Warren “began working on the music and libretto for Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth in 1970”—at least two years before the album was recorded. The album would be a years-long obsession for him. The material required a high level of 21

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technical proficiency, and he was not going to embark upon the project lightly. When he found the talented young band from Cincinnati, the pieces began to fall into place. “Warren,” writes Bowman, “was absolutely certain that the Ditalians were the right vehicle to record his concept, Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth. Changing the group’s name to 24-Carat Black, he spent much of the five years between 1970 and 1975 working with what he saw as raw material.”19 Rob Sevier, who has studied Warren’s work at length, describes him as “one of the few true geniuses I’ve ever encountered.” He suspects Warren sometimes felt the arranging he was doing for other artists was beneath him. “24-Carat Black was the attempt to see his vision come to life,” Sevier says. “He was essentially using them as a canvass.” At some point, Warren approached Al Bell, who by then was largely running operations at Stax. “Dale [told] me that he had an act he wanted to produce,” Bell recalls. “He said, ‘This is different from anything we’ve been doing. But it speaks to what I’d like to do, and what we’ve been talking about.’ He said, ‘I can’t say anymore or explain it any better than that. I just need you— if you believe in me like you have said you do—to give me a free hand and just do what I want to do on them.’” Bell recalls that he said yes immediately. “I said, ‘Dale, you know how I feel about you. So you go and do what you want to do. And when you get done with it and you’re satisfied, I’ll be satisfied.’” The young musicians, however, did not know what to make of this fanatical older man swooping in to reinvent their stage show and rewrite their repertoire. In 1970, most of the Ditalians were still teenagers—Princess Hearn was just sixteen, Tyrone Steels a few years older. They were undoubtedly impressed 22

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with Warren, with his credentials and connections to Isaac Hayes and Stax. And he was Black, just like them. “He was this amazing presence who came into the room and he was half-jokester, half-corporate executive, halfthug—he was just a combination of all those things that made him a species of his own,” says Everson-Price. “You had never seen anything like him. Plus, he was a musical conductor. For us to see this Black guy who composed music and was this great musical director before this orchestra—it was something we had never seen before.” As a bandleader, Warren was strict and exacting, training his musicians like a military sergeant. He would subject the group to grueling musical exercises, having the guitarist repeat riffs over and over or having Steels perform a specific drum part for hours until it was flawless. Rehearsals routinely stretched on for six hours, nearly every night of the week; he also coached the musicians extensively on their stage show. “Our musicianship went to another level when he came on,” Steels says. Adds guitarist Ernest Lattimore: “He was intense about how he wanted his songs played.” And it was his songs—peculiar and long-winded—that sparked some tension within the group, which was more accustomed to performing its well-honed repertoire of feelgood covers. “We weren’t singing about food stamps,” says Derrickson.“We were singing get up, let’s dance, shake your butt, blah blah blah—that was the basis of our songs. We were playing R&B Top 40 hits.” Warren essentially swapped out the group’s crowd-friendly songbook for his own brooding examinations of inner-city desperation and struggle, songs that zeroed in on the moral rot at the center of the post-civil rights-era dream. 23

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It’s a common—and appealing—myth that 24-Carat Black’s sole record is an unvarnished dispatch from the ghetto, but the truth is more complicated. “We lived with our parents,” says Derrickson. “That wasn’t a conversation we were having every day: ‘I gotta pay the rent,’ ‘I gotta get food stamps to eat because my baby is crying.’ We didn’t have kids. When you were sixteen, were you worried about paying the rent? We were Black kids; we grew up in urban areas. We were familiar with the projects and the ghetto and all that, but it wasn’t something that we talked about.” Confirms Steels, “Most of the kids that were playing in the group weren’t living in the ghetto.” Derrickson was open to Warren’s material, describing it as “very enlightening and very different.” But some of the teens were bewildered by Warren’s subject matter, or rejected his vision for the album, deeming it overly pretentious. “A lot of band members got upset,” says Steels. “They thought, when he was gonna present some music, it was gonna sound like it was coming out of Memphis.” The drummer says there was also some residual friction in the group lingering from the doomed Mercury deal, and Warren had walked into a hornet’s nest. Whatever the reason, Larry and Willie Cottrell—founding members—left the group well before the album was recorded. But the rest were eventually convinced, greased over by Warren’s promises of success and fame. “I know he wanted the group to be very successful,” says singer Kathleen Talbert, then known as Kathleen Dent.* Besides, joining forces with

*She later married bandmate Billy Talbert. Although they have since divorced, she continues to use the name Kathleen Talbert.

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Warren meant a guaranteed record deal, given the man’s established relationship with Stax. How could they say no? Around 1972, the group began extensively rehearsing the material for Ghetto. “He had all that mapped out,” says Steels—even the interludes and spoken-word parts. That year Warren disappeared for long stretches to fulfill Stax commitments, notably arranging Ernie Hines’ Electrified and serving as orchestra conductor at the legendary Wattstax benefit concert, a sort of Black Woodstock where Isaac Hayes was greeted as a king.20 But 24-Carat Black remained his passion project. “He called us his babies,” says Lattimore. In fact, there was a more personal development tying him to the group. Warren had ditched his wife for the seventeenyear-old Princess Hearn, who was a decade his junior. “He was the big producer,” Hearn says. “I was impressed.” The two were already married by the time Ghetto was recorded. “We formed a relationship after he had divorced,” Hearn says, then corrects herself: “We formed a relationship before he got divorced, really. He left his wife, took the group on the road.” In late 1972, it was finally time to record Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth. The group’s lineup by this point had ballooned to encompass about a dozen musicians. As indicated in the original LP credits—a forbidding tower of white lettering surrounded by an all-black background— there was William (“Billy”) Talbert on organ, James Talbert on electric piano, Ernest Lattimore (misspelled as “Latimore”) on guitar and vocals, Princess Hearn on vocals, Valerie Malone on vocals, Tyrone Steels (misspelled as “Steele”) on percussions and vocals, Ricky Foster on trumpet, Kathleen Dent on vocals, Gregory Ingram on alto sax, William Gentry 25

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on trumpet, Jerome Derrickson on tenor sax, Larry Austin on bass, and—finally—Dale O. Warren on piano and vibes.* Warren is also credited with viola (in a separate section of the credits that lists the twelve-piece string section) and as the album’s producer, arranger, co-engineer, and one of three “re-mix engineers.”21 It would not require much straining for a casual observer to recognize that this was his baby. We know this much: the album was recorded in Warren’s native Michigan, at a small studio out in the country in Ypsilanti. Favored by local acts like SRC and Ted Nugent (whom Campbell claims was in the studio at the same time as 24-Carat Black), this studio, called Morgan Sound Theatre, was likely chosen for its seductively low prices. A 1971 issue of the Ann Arbor Sun describes Morgan Sound as “an amazing bargain” and “run by freeks [sic].”22 A session cost a mere forty-eight dollars an hour. (Campbell, as he’s fond of reminding me, was the one to secure the studio.) Beyond those spare details, trying to reconstruct the precise circumstances of Ghetto’s recording is like trying to reconstruct the events of Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance. Everybody remembers it differently, and you have to wade through a prickly underbrush of contradictory accounts in order to get anywhere. Here, let me show you what I mean. Steels insists the album (the basic tracks, sans orchestration) was recorded live in one day. He says, “We were there twelve hours.” Derrickson *Although Everson-Price was a member of the group, she’s not credited in the Ghetto liner notes. She believes she was present for the recording sessions, but her memory of it is fuzzy.

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says the recording process took “about a week.” Hearn estimates “two weeks.” Sevier, writing in the liner notes for Gone: The Promises of Yesterday, says “the entire 60-minute album [was] tracked in three marathon weeks for the sake of economy.”23 And Bowman, in the Ghetto reissue liner notes, validates Steels’ version of events: “[T]he whole album was finished in one twelve-hour session. Only the vocals were overdubbed. Everything else was recorded ‘live’ on the floor.”24 Lattimore says the atmosphere in the studio was “beautiful.” Steels says the atmosphere “wasn’t good. People were irritated. Oh, boy.” In his recollection, the friction between Warren and the musicians had reared its head once again. “There were rumors of some people calling him a shyster. Some people didn’t trust him.” And yet Campbell (who is not a musician but was in the studio in a managerial role) has only positive memories of recording Ghetto: “Aw man, it was a lot of fun. Billy Talbert— he was a young genius. All of us had a little hand in it. It was just great.” Another lingering mystery: when was the album recorded? Here we go again. Nobody can remember. According to sources at Craft Recordings—which reissued the album in 2018—the session reels don’t have dates on them. “Early 1973,” claims the Gone liner notes.25 Eventually, Jeff Kollath at the Stax Museum digs through an old filing cabinet and unearths the original master cards, which indicate that Ghetto was recorded in or around December 1972. (The card for “Foodstamps” is labeled “12/20/72.”) That seems about right, since the record was released the following May. 27

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Warren arrived at the session distributing sheet music, an indication of both his classical pedigree and the extent to which he had plotted out his masterpiece long before the tape was running. Of course, his young instrumentalists had already spent months rehearsing the conceptual suite and ironing out every compositional wrinkle. “We had studied that music and played it every day before he came,” says Lattimore. Yet still there was room to showcase the band’s spontaneity and improvisational chops. On the finished record, Warren made room for three instrumentals, two of which—the jaunty “Brown-Baggin’ ” and the explosive “24-Carat Black (Theme)”—emerged from jam sessions. (The latter is the only selection for which Warren does not receive the arrangement credit; instead, Billy Talbert and Gregory Ingram are named.) Indeed, the tension between the record’s competing poles of tightly choreographed orchestration and loose, exhilarating improvisation is part of what makes it such a unique and compelling document. A full orchestra was required to bring Warren’s funkmeets-classical vision to life, particularly the lush, funereal expanse of “Poverty’s Paradise,” the lengthiest song here. Warren employed the services of a twelve-piece string and woodwind section, mainly southern players associated with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, which had performed on Hayes’s . . . To Be Continued three years prior.26 Among them were violinists Noel Gilbert, Robert Snyder, and Albert Edelman, all of whom had recorded with Elvis Presley in the late 1960s, and Edwin Hubbard, a flamboyant and legendary Memphis flutist who had also worked with Presley.27 28

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According to Derrickson, Warren took the basic tracks to Memphis and overdubbed the strings there. Then he spent months laboring to mix the album. “He worked all in different places,” says Campbell. “We just piecemealed this thing.” Campbell remembers being excited for the album to be finally released. They were all excited. This was it—the big break Warren had promised. And the album was obviously special. “It was just different,” says Campbell. “See, our record was just like the wind. And just like the Holy Ghost. You couldn’t see it. But you sure could feel it.” Forty-six years later, after we cruise past Warren’s house in Ypsilanti, Campbell decides to drive out to Morgan Road and show me where Ghetto was recorded. Except it seems there’s nothing to see. Just an endless expanse of grassy farmland. Still, Campbell is determined to locate what remains of the studio. He stops a passing vehicle and asks if they know anything about Morgan Sound. They don’t.“It was a long time ago,” he concedes. Finally, after half an hour of aimless searching, we find it: a condemned-looking white building tucked behind an overgrown lot. Campbell, clad in his formal clothes from church, gets out in the sweltering heat, and I snap a photo of him posing in front of the barbed-wire fence that keeps us from the property. Suddenly, the excursion feels a little silly. What had I expected to find? A plaque? A 24-Carat Black museum? This is just a long-defunct studio, abandoned and left for dead, just like Ghetto was in 1973. When Al Bell first heard the record, he was astonished. “I listened to it after he had completed it,” he says. “And I said, 29

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‘This man is out of his mind. This is brilliant.’ I knew he was great. But how in the hell did he manage to tell the story of the ghetto?” Bell cackles at the ingenuity of it all. “I mean, it’s a masterpiece! It’s a masterpiece! It, to me, was a Mona Lisa. Or a piece of art that was comparable to that. After that one listen, I said, ‘There’s nothing else to say other than put this in the marketplace and let’s go to work.’ And we did. But we were getting resistance at radio stations where I thought they would accept it and understand it.” On May 25, 1973, Ghetto finally hit stores. It was issued on the Stax subsidiary label Enterprise, which Jeff Kollath describes as “sort of the experimental label, the progressive funk label.” Named as such because Bell was a self-described Star Trek nut, Enterprise was the musical home of Isaac Hayes and many Stax oddities, such as the sole album by Detroit funk-rock outfit Black Nasty. Now it was the home of 24-Carat Black. The album was a flop. It didn’t sell. Of course it didn’t. With its weighty themes, Ghetto struggled to find a market among Stax listeners seeking breezy soul hooks. “The whole album was before its time,” Hearn says, and it is hard to articulate a simpler or more roundly accurate explanation than that one. Indeed, it’s difficult to overstate just how unwieldy and strange this record must have seemed to anyone who stumbled across it in 1973. Ghetto was positioned as a highconcept soul opera at a time when rock operas were almost exclusively the purview of white prog-rock bands. With its fearless merging of hard-charging funk, gospel, spoken word, and theatricality, the album was at least as ambitious as Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon or The Who’s Quadrophenia—two celebrated rock concept albums from 30

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the same year—yet Warren’s attempt to carve out a similar degree of urbane sophistication for Black audiences fell on indifferent ears. Nor did it mesh with the Black positivity associated with Motown or James Brown, with his rousing shouts of “Say it loud! I’m Black and I’m proud!” Warren’s masterpiece offered no such concise chants of Black empowerment, and few inklings of hope. The album was just plain gloomy—“a downer message to the emerging Black middle class and too heady for a populace basking in the afterglow of the Wattstax festival,” as Numero Group cofounder Ken Shipley writes.28 In the golden age of Earth, Wind & Fire and The Jackson 5, R&B never sounded quite this bleak. Yes, Marvin Gaye and Sly and the Family Stone had, in 1971, delivered their own heady assessments of the death of the sixties dream—What’s Going On and There’s a Riot Goin’ On, respectively, the latter titled in response to the former. Riot, with its strung-out sonic murk, particularly feels like a distant cousin of Ghetto. But these albums still delivered radio hits, and big ones. Plus, Marvin Gaye and Sly were already household names— and long-established hitmakers—by the time 1971 rolled around. Nobody knew who 24-Carat Black was, and without aggressive radio support of the kind that rescued Hot Buttered Soul, few record buyers were going to find out. And radio didn’t go for 24-Carat Black. Tensions spiraled between Stax and Warren, who reportedly refused to edit the group’s songs down to single-length.29 (The album itself was a hefty 57-and-a-half minutes, just barely short enough to fit on one LP.) The young musicians were disappointed by what they saw as Stax’s failure to promote the record. For Steels, time hasn’t 31

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dulled his frustration. “I was upset,” he says. “I wish Stax would’ve got behind it better. I think they could’ve come up with a marketing concept with that album. There was some stuff on that album that could have opened up the way for the rest of the songs to break through. Like ‘24-Carat Black (Theme)’—it’s jazz, guys! Somebody at Stax wasn’t thinking.” “We didn’t have any support,” says C. Niambi Steele, who would join the group in time to spend years touring behind Ghetto. “The record didn’t go anywhere. It was somewhere in a box. Nobody cared. Nobody knew who we were. We knew what the dream was. We knew what we were trying to do. But nobody else knew it.” The commonly accepted narrative is that Stax didn’t, or couldn’t, promote Ghetto. Certainly, it was no priority. This is clear if you own Isaac Hayes’s album Joy—released in late 1973— and look at the inner sleeve, which contains a grid advertising sixteen recent Stax releases, including titles by the Staple Singers and the Bar-Kays. Ghetto was a new release at the time, but is not pictured. “I’ve seen some promo for Black Nasty,” says Jeff Kollath, who has spent years immersed in the Stax Museum. “But I’ve not seen anything for 24-Carat Black, really at all.” Still, Bell chafes at the notion that he didn’t try to get it heard. He loved the record.* He was also a former disc jockey *It’s possible that Bell is overstating his support for Ghetto, but his affection for the album (and regret that it didn’t sell) seems sincere. When I first reach out to him for an interview, I expect a polite rebuff at best. Instead, his assistant emails me back saying he is “delighted and THRILLED to have the opportunity” to discuss 24-Carat Black. “I considered it a masterpiece,” Bell tells me numerous times. “It probably was ahead of its time.”

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with deep ties to Black radio stations. “I would be on the phone working this product myself,” Bell says. “Disc jockeys respected me. They would say to me, ‘This 24-Carat Black, man. That’s just not something that will work with our audience.’ They literally would tell me that . . . They hadn’t heard anything like that before and didn’t know enough about 24-Carat Black and how their audience would appreciate it.” Despite this resistance, Campbell says he got the group’s music played by The Electrifying Mojo, a legendary Michigan disc jockey. Regardless of Bell’s efforts, Ghetto was likely also stymied by the mounting financial problems Stax was facing, including a disastrous distribution deal with CBS Records. Bell had formed the deal with CBS head Clive Davis, who was eager to penetrate the Black music marketplace and whom Bell trusted. It was essentially a handshake deal between the two men. But after Davis was fired in 1973— allegedly for $94,000 worth of expense-account violations— the deal turned sour.30 The new brass at CBS had little respect for Stax and stopped pushing Stax inventory to big-box retailers in order to minimize competition with their own R&B acts. CBS was effectively strangling Stax’s business, yet refused to release the label from the contract. “That’s when they started setting out to destroy Stax Records,” Bell says. “After they fired Clive, my deal went from a great, unusual deal, where both CBS and Stax were benefiting, down the toilet. They were ordering product from us. And they would put it in a warehouse and not even ship it to stores. They were trying to destroy me.” This culminated in Stax filing a $67 million antitrust suit against CBS. 33

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The short-term effect: “Stax was having a hard time getting records to the stores,” says Kollath. Long-term, the episode did severe harm to the label’s business viability. It’s impossible to know how much the CBS situation interfered with 24-Carat Black’s album specifically, but it surely didn’t help. In any case, Bell can’t remember how many copies Ghetto sold. “I don’t think it was many,” he says. “Cuz if it was, I don’t think the shock of me talking to you on the phone about it would be so great.” After Ghetto was released, 24-Carat Black embarked on a brief tour of the South, winding their way through the Chitlin’ Circuit and playing predominantly Black clubs with names like The River Gate and Up Jump the Devil. Money was slim; at most clubs, they just got a cut of the door. By this point, the band was performing a mix of its Top 40 repertoire and the Ghetto material. “We would mix it in there to see how the crowd would react,” says Steels. “And the reaction wasn’t that good.” Warren (who was sometimes backstage directing, sometimes onstage cradling his violin) had dramatically reimagined the band’s stage presence. “He turned our show into a theatrical show—like, you go see a Broadway play,” says Derrickson. In the early days, the entire band would stand and dance while performing, a spectacle Derrickson compares to a James Brown show. “Dale turned the band into like an orchestra. Everybody sat down, except the singers. The singers would come out, and they were very theatrical with their moves, more ballet-ish.” 34

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As an all-Black outfit traveling through the Deep South in the shadow of the Jim Crow era, 24-Carat Black had worse things to worry about than unreceptive crowds. Several members recall a terrifying run-in with what appeared to be members of the Ku Klux Klan.* As Campbell tells it, the musicians were in North Carolina, en route to Camp Lejeune, when they stopped at a rural gas station.† The band’s white van was decorated with a banner that said “24-Carat Black,” which caught the attention of a gang of racist whites. “During that era, you riding down South with this big truck saying ‘24-Carat Black’—people don’t know what that means,” says Lattimore. These men looked to be KKK (or, as Lattimore describes them, “a bunch of wild fellas that didn’t care for Black people”). The confrontation escalated fast. “Man, we had guns drawn on us,” says Campbell. “Those hillbillies, they said: ‘24-Carat Black. That’s too goddamn Black for me.’ I just told everybody: ‘Listen. Just get what you get and let’s get back in the van.’ So the guy pulled up and pointed a gun. Then one of my guys, Sonny Talbert—I didn’t know he had a pistol. He pulled his gun. I said, ‘No, don’t do this.’ He started to shoot. I said, ‘No, don’t—’ So I got the gun from him. Those hillbillies, they pulled a gun on us. So we went on down the road.” “I think they got in the grass and pointed guns at us or something,” says Steels. “Everybody just went crazy.” *How did they know these men were KKK members? “I think they had it on their car or something?” Steels says. †Everson-Price’s memory differs: she believes this incident occurred at a truck stop “somewhere along the Kentucky-Tennessee state line.”

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Everson-Price was buying snacks when the altercation began. When she exited the rest stop, “things felt kind of strange,” she says. “When I looked around, we saw these guys in this pickup truck that had a big old rifle on the back. They said, ‘Get in the car! Get in the car!’ I’m the last one coming out of the store. By the time we got in the car, it had escalated to the point that we knew these guys were KKK or were not friendly to Black people . . . We were in such a hurry to get out of there, we were going in the wrong direction on the wrong side of the highway. It was scary.” Steels says they simply drove off and the men did not pursue them. Everson-Price’s recollection is more dramatic. “We tore out of there,” she says. “They were behind us. They were chasing us out of there. That’s how we ended up turning down the wrong side of the median—because they were in pursuit of us. We were trying very hard not to die.” Nobody died, but that doesn’t mean 24-Carat Black’s lineup survived the tour. Friction was brewing. A sizable faction of the band had grown disillusioned with Warren and his empty promises. “I didn’t trust him,” admits Kathleen Talbert. Add to that Campbell’s frustration with the man’s shady dealings and Virginia Talbert’s disapproval of his romance with Hearn, and a mutiny was inevitable. One source of tension was the lack of compensation for Ghetto. “We didn’t get paid for the recording session,” confirms Derrickson. “We didn’t get paid from album sales. Any money we made came from the live performances.” Derrickson believes this is because the musicians never actually saw or signed a contract with Stax. “Our deal was with Dale,” he explains. “And Dale had the deal with Stax 36

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Records.” As Everson-Price puts it: “That was before we ever started signing papers for studio time. We were just in it because we were young and we wanted to do it.” In Memphis, the band visited Stax headquarters to meet with label executives, hoping to secure a budget for a second album. They rehearsed in the historic Stax studios and played a showcase at the Holiday Inn, where they performed Ghetto in its entirety.31 That went well. The talks, however, were disastrous. “Down there in Memphis is where it really came to a head between Clarence and Miss Talbert and Dale,” says Steels. “It just really got nasty.” So nasty, in fact, that Campbell and Virginia Talbert walked away from their partnership with Warren. “This is when Miss Talbert said, ‘We going back home.’ She said, ‘Come on, y’all,’ ” Steels says. As Derrickson puts it, “Clarence and Miss Talbert felt that Dale was screwing the group.” A majority of the lineup quit on the spot, hopped in the back of a U-Haul, and returned to Cincinnati. “We decided we weren’t going to deal with Dale Warren anymore,” says Lattimore. “We only gonna be somebody’s sucker for a minute. As soon as we see the light, we out of there.” The group split in two. A smaller faction—Steels, Derrickson, and Hearn (by now married to the man)—chose to remain with Warren and carry on the band. While their bandmates felt misled by the arranger, they stuck by him. “It’s kind of like a family,” says Derrickson. “Mom and daddy fell out. If you a mama’s boy, you gonna listen to mama, no matter what daddy says. It was like that for us.” (Ricky Foster quit but later returned to the fold. Everson-Price remained an on-off 37

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member of the group; she says she wasn’t present for the scuffle in Memphis.) A less determined bandleader would have given up after more than half his band quit. But Warren was almost fanatically devoted to his vision. With help from Robert Manchurian—an old pal from his Motown days—he began scouring the Midwest for new recruits. Manchurian, a jack-of-all-trades arranger and singer who had recorded under pseudonyms like Robert Dunson and The Mighty Manchurian, would be crucial to this new iteration of 24-Carat Black. Born in 1933, he was much older than the others and had first met Warren a decade prior in Detroit. With his shaved head and full beard, Manchurian looked a little like Mr. Black Moses himself, Isaac Hayes. He first performed with 24-Carat Black at a Rainbow Coalition event in Cincinnati right after Ghetto dropped. With Campbell out of the picture, he quickly became a manager and Warren’s right-hand man, “whipping everybody into shape,” as Steels puts it. (Manchurian objects: “We was partners! He was like a right-hand man to me!”) Slowly, a new 24-Carat Black began to take shape. Bruce Thompson, a skilled keyboard player and organist, was scouted at a Wurlitzer store in a Chicago suburb. He not only replaced Billy Talbert but rose to become the new group’s music director. Thompson in turn recruited bassist John Walls, guitarist Rayford Smith, and his own distant cousin Jaonne Xavier Thompson, an intensely disciplined saxophonist. “Jerome [Derrickson] auditioned me,” says Jaonne, who today goes by Shakir Suleiman. “Asked me if I can read. Gave me some sheet music. He said: ‘OK, man. You 38

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got the job. We leaving in two, three days.’ ” Suleiman later recruited his wife, Hedda Sudduth, of the Chicago soul group The Eight Minutes, to join as a singer. In Indianapolis, the group encountered a twenty-fiveyear-old actress and singer named C. Niambi Steele,* a single mother living in the projects with two young children. Niambi desperately longed to be an artist. She was involved in the city’s Black Arts Theatre, a local organization that performed plays by Black Arts Movement luminaries like Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez. In 1973, the troupe’s director, Wilma Green, was involved in planning a formal dinner dance hosted by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “It was a big fucking deal,” says Niambi. “Nikki Giovanni was the invited guest, and 24-Carat Black was playing the music.” Niambi was selected to write some words introducing Giovanni’s keynote speech, so she got to attend the lavish dinner. “It was quite an evening,” she says, “not only because of the lineup of speakers, but it was the first time that the wait staff was entirely white for a Black social event.” Some newspaper sleuthing confirms that this event—the SCLC Annual Dinner—occurred in Indianapolis on December 1, 1973. According to a local college paper, the guest speakers that year were Giovanni and Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress. The newspaper preview notes, “We also expect entertainment from Stax *No relation to Tyrone Steels (with an “S” at the end). But I’ll refer to her as Niambi—her preferred name—to minimize confusion.

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Record Company by a group called ‘24 Carat Black’ doing their new album release ‘Ghetto Misfortune’s Wealth.’ ”32 Niambi met the band backstage and learned they needed a new singer. Warren invited her to come to Chicago and audition. She did. The audition took place at a swanky highrise apartment overlooking Lake Michigan. She feared she had wasted her money on the bus ticket. “I was so scared,” Niambi recalls. “But he did say, ‘You came, and you’re gonna be rewarded. You’re gonna be with the group. And your future is in my hands. The music we’re doing is gonna last to your grandchildren’s children.’ He was so passionate.” Niambi left her kids with her mother and spent the next two years (1973–5) on the road with 24-Carat Black. Keyboardist Tommy Edwards and trumpetist Mr. Nommo (real name Victor “Nommo” McCadd—whom Niambi later married) rounded out the new lineup. Original members sometimes refer to this lineup as the “second group,” or the “Chicago group,” since many were recruited in Chicago. Think of it as two different 24-Carat Blacks—kind of like how Pink Floyd in 1967 was a drastically different band than Pink Floyd in 1987. Although most of this band did not appear on Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth, the musicians would spend brutal years performing the album nonstop on the road. First came a grueling period of rehearsals. The old-timers were tasked with training the newcomers. “A lot of these guys were green,” says Steels. “Me and Derrickson became the sergeant-at-arms. We became some really nasty guys.” But it was Warren whose relentless regimen could frighten anyone. “He was scary,” Niambi says. “He was very intense. But his 40

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center of gravity was like an animal. He could move very fast. He was stage manager. If something was going wrong, he was moving. I mean, the man did everything . . . He just whipped us into shape. After we played a gig, we were rehearsing until like 9:00 in the morning. Clubs close at 3:00 or 4:00. That’s when we start rehearsing.” Musicians often use the word “military” to describe Warren’s style. “When we were out promoting the Ghetto album, Dale would get us up military-style,” says EversonPrice.“We would have to get up at seven o’clock in the morning. We would have to go to a room. And we would be in this room—all twenty-four of us—rehearsing. The thing that was amazing about this was, if you were staying in that hotel, you did not know that we were in that room rehearsing. He taught the drummer to have a tile over the snare. It was so quiet.” Suleiman adds, “When he came into rehearsal, he said, ‘Listen: your name is Master X. Jerome, your name is Master Derrickson.’ Everybody was like a concert master. He made us understand that that potential was in each one of us.” Many say they are grateful for how Warren lifted their skills. “One night he actually came out and walked me across the stage to show me how to work an audience,” says Niambi. “I was brand new. I’m singing. He said, ‘Just keep singing.’ He’s like, ‘This is how you do it. Go over here. Keep singing. Don’t stop.’ It was on-the-job-training. It was crazy.” Everson-Price was once a background singer. Today she’s the bandleader of a ten-piece show band. “And I owe that to Dale Warren,” she says. At a juke joint down South, he encouraged her to do a solo number as “Miss Patrice.” She was petrified. “He basically took the microphone cord and 41

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dragged me out reluctantly into the center of the room! And there I was, birthed as the frontperson for The Miss Patrice Show. And to this day, there is no stage I cannot manage. There is no room I cannot control. And it was all birthed in that space with Dale Warren.” If you could travel back in time and attend one historic concert, which would it be? For years, if you asked me this question, I would say the 1983 show where Prince recorded “Purple Rain.” Or maybe Talking Heads circa Remain in Light. Now I’m changing my answer: I’d go see 24-Carat Black. There are plenty of videos that can roughly convey what it was like to see Prince or Talking Heads in the early 1980s. But there is, to my knowledge, no surviving videographic evidence of 24-Carat Black’s Ghetto tour. (If you know of any, please contact me.) All we have are recollections from the surviving members, which are fortunately quite detailed. By 1974, the group’s performances had blossomed into a multipart theatrical revue. The most elaborate sequence involved the band performing Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth in its entirety while dramatizing the lyrical themes.“It was theater and music,” says Suleiman. “All at the same time.” Rob Sevier’s liner notes essay includes an overview of a typical show: The rhythm section, dubbed Con Brio, opened with instrumentals and improvisations. Then the horn sections appeared, carrying the band into the suite from Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth. Le Fleur et Bonet, the female vocal unit, arrived next to perform a choreographed dance 42

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before breaking into song. The first set played out as a grim street musical, just as Warren had envisioned it. The more accessible second set incorporated hits of the day, classic Dale Warren compositions, and other Stax product done in 24-Carat Black style.33 The show also spotlighted individual solo acts within the 24-Carat Black universe. “It was like a revue,” says EversonPrice. “The Mighty Manchurian was doing all this stuff that Isaac Hayes was doing. He would come out with his chains on and no shirt. He was Black and bald-headed and sexy. The Miss Patrice Show was like everything Betty Wright or Denise LaSalle would do. And then Princess came out with 24-Carat Black.” Performances generally ended with the gospel deliverance of “God Save the World”—Hearn’s signature song. Often the band would back Manchurian, an established showman (“I was way ahead of them,” he boasts). Some nights Niambi would perform solo interpretive dance. And audiences would routinely be subjected to dramatic skits. “We used to have to warn the crowd, because it got so deep and we had these guns with the caps in it,” says Hearn. “We’d put on this production to scare everybody in the club, and we had to warn them: ‘This is part of the act.’ ” Steels compares it to a Broadway musical. “In these clubs, a lot of people weren’t ready for that,” he says of the skits. “When we got to that part of the show, a lot of people got, ‘Oh, man. We’re in a club!’ And they just didn’t like that. Matter of fact, some of the club owners didn’t like it.” Warren had a flair for bizarre dramatic gestures. Once, in Florida, he decided the band would “bury” poverty onstage. 43

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“He found a casket somewhere in this town,” swears Niambi, “and we walked into the club. The band is onstage playing. And we walk in carrying the casket. Nobody knew what the fuck was going on. Some people ran. But see, he was willing to do that.”* Audiences were frequently bewildered; Warren didn’t care. For over a year, 24-Carat Black crisscrossed the Chitlin’ Circuit, playing hole-in-the-wall joints in places like Yazoo City, MI, and desperately carving out a tiny corner of show business. Most gigs were in clubs—“some of them real bad places,” Steels says. “Dangerous. Some rough areas.” The band’s fortunes seemed to fluctuate wildly. “One week we would be in the back of a U-Haul, sucking up fumes,” says Everson-Price. “Next week we would be in the Palmer House in Chicago, riding in limousines, playing in a packed venue.” “Sometimes we ate great,” Niambi adds, “and sometimes we had to kill our food. I remember one time we were in Florida, and we actually had to go find oysters to eat.” The musicians usually rode in the back of a U-Haul, which led to some near-death experiences, such as an amp falling on Everson-Price’s head and sending her to the hospital. Other memories are more blissful. “I remember looking out the back of a U-Haul, seeing the stars,” she says. “Cars would pass us, blow horns, and blink their lights at us, and we were riding in the back of a U-Haul, smelling all the fumes. We would be going from town to town, until we got to a hotel.”

*Steels doesn’t recall the casket incident. “It might have happened,” he laughs. “We did a lot of crazy stuff.”

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But success never arrived, and long months on the road took a grueling toll. After the original group quit, Warren changed. “He got worse,” Steels says. “He got to drinking more. I think it crushed him. I could see his mood was just so depressing all the time . . . He started doing some things that eventually got us in trouble.” As Warren became more unstable, Steels (now accompanied by his wife and child) and Derrickson took on more responsibility, with the latter serving as road manager. “My partner, God bless his soul—he had a drinking problem, man,” Manchurian says. “I was the only one that could really rescue and keep him going. He was getting lackadaisical in things cuz of his drinking habit.” Having known the man the longest, Manchurian was well-acquainted with his appetites: “We’d be in the studio sometimes and have a session to do. Dale would be somewhere with a woman. Drinking. And would be late! A lot of sessions I saved, because I got to know his habits.” Sometimes it was a struggle just to stay fed. The band was broke. “I would call my mom or my dad and they would send money to Western Union,” Everson-Price says. “When we got to that Western Union place, they would have money.” One day, Everson-Price scrounged up everyone’s cash, went to the grocery store, and had enough money for a huge can of pork and beans, an onion, two packs of hot dogs, and some loaves of bread. “I went back to the hotel room, put it in a crock pot, stirred it all together—with the onion, the hot dogs—and they came through like it was a soup kitchen in the army,” she says. “I remember feeding twenty-four people for fifteen dollars!” 45

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When Stax money grew slim, Warren used his own money to keep the group afloat. In 1974, he was commissioned to score the movie The Klansman—a rightfully panned racial melodrama featuring O. J. Simpson’s film debut—and used the paycheck to finance 24-Carat Black’s tour. (Although the Staple Singers and Princess Hearn were the only Stax vocalists featured on the soundtrack, some of the music was rehearsed by 24-Carat Black, according to Suleiman, who adds: “We were his sounding board.”34) On one occasion, he resorted to borrowing money from Niambi’s mother. This was during a stint in Indianapolis, Niambi says, when the band was staying in cheap hotel rooms on the outskirts of town. Warren couldn’t pay the bill. “He went to her like, ‘I got your daughter out here. We’re not making money now, but trust me: it’s coming. It’s coming,’” Niambi recalls. “He never paid her back. It was a couple thousand.” This was probably December 1974, when 24-Carat Black played an extended run of shows at Gordy’s Lounge in Indianapolis. Writing in the Indianapolis Recorder, an African-American weekly, a twenty-one-year-old journalist raved about the band: Back at Gordy’s Cocktail Lounge by popular demand and leaving the crowd shouting for more is the bad, bad 24 Carat Black. They appeared at Gordy’s last Friday and Saturday and will return this weekend ’till New Years. [. . .] The show they put on was dynamite and I’m sure once you see them, you will agree.35 That reporter, Eunice Trotter (then Eunice McLayea), is now a member of the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame. Reached 46

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by phone, Trotter has only the vaguest memory of that show. But she stands by the piece. “The way I would write those columns is, if they weren’t good, I wouldn’t say it,” she says. “So I just have to stand by what I thought of them at the time.” By mid-1974, Stax was in dire financial straits. Al Bell took out bank loans in an attempt to ward off bankruptcy, but there would be no road back to prosperity. And the label’s relationship with its biggest star had deteriorated: in September, Isaac Hayes sued Stax for $5.3 million in damages. The suit was settled out of court, and Hayes was released from his contract, a devastating loss for Stax.36 Against this backdrop, 24-Carat Black was hurtling towards rock bottom. The band had been rehearsing new material. In late 1974, Warren financed sessions in Chicago— 24-Carat Black’s new home base—where the band recorded more than twenty demos for a radically different second album. But due to Stax’s financial woes, Warren’s instability, or both, the album was never finished. It was a distressing time. At some point, Manchurian flew to Memphis to pick up a check from Stax—money to keep 24-Carat Black afloat on tour. “I got the check,” Manchurian says. “Went to the Union [Planters] Bank. Soon as I got there, the teller, she said: ‘If you got here five minutes earlier, we would have cashed it. We can’t now. The accounts have been frozen.’ I’m standing there with a $35,000 check in my hand, looking crazy.” Meanwhile, hotel bills were going unpaid. Niambi says Warren was in the habit of presenting hotels with letters of 47

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intent from Stax, basically I-owe-you forms. “They were called; everybody would be on the phone: ‘OK, they’re here, 24-Carat Black. How many rooms? Ten?’ ‘Oh, no. We need two extra rooms because somebody’s baby is coming from Cincinnati.’ I mean, look—it was a gypsy camp. Because wives, mothers, babies, cousins—some of them showed up.” Then came a new low: jail. In early 1975, during a stay in Lexington, Kentucky, the male musicians were locked up for not paying a hotel bill. The band had been staying at an inn for weeks, eating three meals a day there. Eventually, management called the police. “Little did we know that Dale had not been paying the bills for the hotel,” Everson-Price says. “Either he had been giving them bad checks or giving them bad credit cards.* I remember getting a call saying, ‘We gotta go. You ain’t got time to pack.’ All the girls was staying in one room. It wasn’t until the next day we found out the girls and Dale escaped, but the fellas were arrested.” Suleiman describes it like this: “Woke up one day. A bunch of police outside. They’re going: ‘Would the aggregation of 24-Carat Black please step outside.’ So we stepped outside. Once we saw what it was, we realized Dale had not paid the bills. I figured at least somebody was paying the bills.” They were instructed not to go back for their possessions, but Suleiman rebelled. “I immediately went back in to get my saxophones. They weren’t gonna keep my horns. My horns were vintage. The minute he said ‘Nobody will be going back inside the room’—well, he just have to shoot me.” *According to Suleiman, it was the former: “The check that he gave them bounced.”

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The men—except Warren and Derrickson, who by chance were out when the cops arrived—were carted off to jail. How many days they spent there is a matter of some disagreement. Manchurian says a day, maybe a day-and-a-half. Suleiman says ten days. Steels say, “It was over a weekend. Maybe five days. And a club owner bailed us out. We had to pay to get our stuff back. We had to pay that ourselves.” Suleiman’s account is more dramatic. “It was a bullpen!” he says. “We were all right there together. Me, I meditated the whole ten days. Jerome [Derrickson] came to see us two, three times. Said he’s gonna get us out. Then he sent a baby girl in to get me out. I said, ‘You gotta get everybody out.’ They got everybody out.” (The “baby girl” was a mysterious woman Suleiman had befriended in Indianapolis, who apparently brought a bail bondsman to get them out.) The female singers, meanwhile, were stranded. “We had to call our parents to come and get us,” Everson-Price says. “It spiraled out of control after that. That was pretty much the end of 24-Carat Black.” Jail was the last straw. Steels was fed up. He’d been in the band longer than anyone—indeed, since the Ditalians first formed. After Kentucky, “we left,” he says. “Me and my wife said: ‘We’re out.’ ” They went home. Suleiman, too. “It’s one thing not to get paid,” he says. “It’s a whole ’nother thing to be in jail. I’m not gonna roll with a bunch of criminals. Cuz I’m not a criminal.” Numero Group’s research indicates the band carried on for several sad months and fulfilled a depressing monthlong residency in southwest Michigan.37 In February, the band played the gymnasium of Benton Harbor High 49

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School—hardly a prestigious venue—according to a local paper, which claimed 24-Carat Black “has cut five albums” (not true) “and will record music for another soon.”38 Not exactly. The dream was over. Stax was near death. The album was abandoned. And, according to Derrickson, U-Haul was looking for the group because the U-Haul bill hadn’t been paid. “We didn’t have any money,” Niambi says. “We were going from town to town, just trying to survive. But once we left Benton Harbor, it was pretty obvious we weren’t getting any gigs. We didn’t have letters from the record company. Cuz the record companies didn’t exist anymore. All of a sudden, those letters no longer meant anything.” They got to Chicago and went their separate ways. It was 1975, a year that would conclude with Stax’s involuntary bankruptcy. Niambi had been away from her family for well over a year. She had to go home. Her son’s fourth birthday was coming up. And she didn’t have any money to buy him a birthday present. After 24-Carat Black disintegrated, Steels returned to Cincinnati. He got a call from his old bandmate Billy Talbert about forming a new band. He wound up reuniting with Talbert and other ex-bandmates—Larry Austin, William Gentry, Gregory Ingram, and Ernest Lattimore—to form Shotgun, which landed a deal with ABC Records. Generating a string of albums in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Shotgun specialized in a much more straightforward brand of funk-rock fusion. Not surprisingly, the group achieved more commercial appeal than 24-Carat Black, landing eight singles on the 50

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Billboard R&B charts—including the deliriously danceable “Don’t You Wanna Make Love.” Yet crossover success remained elusive. “They all fell on hard times,” says Derrickson. Derrickson also wound up in a significantly more successful band: Zapp, the electro-funk outfit known for its embrace of the talk-box and its early association with George Clinton. “We were part of the Funk Mob,” Derrickson says. “We recorded our first record, ‘More Bounce to the Ounce,’ and it became a big hit. We immediately went on tour with Gladys Knight, the Commodores, [and] The Bar-Kays.” The group achieved several gold records during the early 1980s. Zapp later proved influential to the G-funk movement and was sampled by West Coast rappers like 2Pac and Ice Cube. In 1999, the band’s story came to a tragic and bizarre end when frontman Roger Troutman was killed by his own brother and bandmate in a murder–suicide.39 Derrickson eventually settled in Atlanta, where he owns a talent agency. As for Warren, he and Hearn had two sons and settled in Indianapolis. In October 1975, Warren, harboring ambitions of launching a label, was profiled in The Indianapolis News. Evidently, he wished to “announce his presence to other musicians” in the area. The article rattles off his achievements but mentions 24-Carat Black only once, as an afterthought (by contrast, his involvement with The Klansman receives two detailed paragraphs). The author presumably had not heard Ghetto: Warren conducted and toured for 3½ years, he said, with a group called 24 Carat Black, which he describes as now 51

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being on a “sabbatical.” The featured vocalist was his wife, Princess. It is with albums for Princess that Warren said he expects to launch a record company here, provided, of course, he can find a multi-track facility of professional standards.40 The record company never materialized. And settling, in the monogamy sense, was not in Warren’s nature. The marriage did not last. “He was a nurturing husband and father,” Hearn says. “He was creative with his hands, building things. We refurnished the home in Indianapolis. Then he had a little problem with alcoholism. He went into a depression state. That’s really what took him out.” This contributed to the end of the marriage, Hearn says. But there was another factor: “Infidelity. He fathered a child with his music copyist.” When Hearn discovered the affair (after Warren had spent eight months in California), she and the children left. Everson-Price—Hearn’s sister—offers a blunter assessment of why the marriage failed: “Because he was a jerk?” She laughs hard. “Pretty much that’s why it ended. We had an intervention. We got my sister and dragged her back to Cincinnati and made her stay here.” Hearn and her sons have remained in Cincinnati. She recently retired after twenty-five years as a corporate receptionist and sings regularly at her church. Warren relocated to Los Angeles, and eventually Atlanta, immersing himself in his original love: classical music. After 24-Carat Black, he earned a PhD in music and devoted himself to conducting and performing in orchestras full-time. In 1989, 52

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according to his aunt’s memoir, Warren became the conductor and musical director of L.A.’s Southeast Symphony Orchestra, one of the world’s oldest primarily African-American orchestras.41 It was a mediocre community orchestra when he joined, Vicki Gray tells me. Yet by the first performance of the season, it sounded like a new symphony. “He would hold them to a serious standard,” she says. He did not fully abandon R&B—at least not right away. In 1977 and 1978, Warren provided orchestral arrangements for Patti LaBelle’s first two solo albums. It was then that he began working with Vicki Gray, the young music copyist who became his protégé. And then she became more than his protégé. Vicki does not mince words: he came onto her, early in their working relationship, while still married to Hearn. He was a celebrated arranger; she was just starting her career. “It was a situation where I calculated: I want to get paid. I want to make sure I get paid. And I got paid,” she says. I ask Vicki how long she and Warren were in a romantic relationship. She corrects me: “A romantic relationship is kind of a misnomer. I was in a professional relationship for seventeen years. Not all of that was a romantic relationship. He married other women. I chose not to be one to marry him. I was more his business partner.” When I ask what she makes of the man’s obvious womanizer tendencies, she is unsparing. “He was a shit! What can I tell you? You use who you can use for a period of time, and when you’ve used them up, you move on to the next one. That’s a shit, as far as I’m concerned.” In 1983, she had Warren’s child. (Around then, he and Hearn divorced.) Vicki says he was more present in that 53

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child’s life than any of his other children. “I was the one he stayed with the longest out of everybody,” confirms the daughter, Tori Gray, who lived with Warren for the first ten years of her life. (According to her, Warren had, by the end of his life, “at least 20–21 children, across the country.”) Tori is now a tattoo artist in her mid-thirties. She has never spoken publicly about her father before. When I call her up— after a brief exchange over text—I do not know what to expect. I ask about her childhood. “How deep do you want to go?” Tori chuckles darkly. “It was a rough childhood for me.” The conversation turns darker than I had imagined. Over the course of the next hour, Tori gets choked up as she tells me alleged details of how Warren was physically abusive to her when she was a child. Much of the abuse occurred, she says, during a period of nearly two years when her mother was away and she was living with Warren. “I was about two when it started,” Tori tells me. “And it wasn’t anything where he was beating me. I would have to get tied up while he was at work because he had another woman that he had married while my mom was away, and he lied to me and told me that this woman was my sister.” As a toddler, Tori was led to believe that her father’s new wife was in fact his daughter. After this woman told Warren that Tori was trying to beat her while she was trying to sleep, “he would tie me up to the front seat of his motor home while he was gone,” Tori says. “I still have the scars.” Then there was the alcoholism, which continued to exert a vicious pull over Warren—even his parenting. Tori says that he would give her orange juice mixed with gin. “I remember being about five years old, sitting down until the wee hours of 54

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the morning, watching VH1 with him, and I’d have a baby bottle of gin and juice,” she says. Years later, on her twentyfirst birthday, she memorialized her father by drinking a baby bottle of Beefeater gin mixed with orange juice. “I could barely drink it. It made me sick.” She believes, in retrospect, that her father’s alcoholism stemmed from his own unhappy childhood. “He was one of those troubled geniuses, as most of them are,” she says. “He was so, so talented. And so troubled. He was traumatized. And I could tell he was traumatized.” The alleged abuse continued during her school years. Study time with her father was particularly rough, Tori tells me. One incident, from when she was about eight, sticks in her memory. “He was cleaning the oven while I was in my room studying,” she recalls, her voice heavy with the pain of the memory. “And he would call me to the kitchen to recite my multiplication tables, and if I got just one wrong, he’s like, ‘OK, go back in the room and prepare for a spanking.’ And I would get spanked and I would have to do the whole thing over again. Every time I got one wrong, I’d have to get a spanking for it.” Now Tori is audibly crying, and I am feebly offering words of apology for what she has gone through. “It’s definitely created some interesting life lessons for me,” she says. “The way I’ve dealt with men my entire life is—it’s been very, very rough. Because it caused me to pick guys that were narcissistic, womanizing, abusive in many different ways. And not even realize that I was doing it until I was balls deep into the situation.” In tears, she pauses to collect herself. “It’s taken a lifetime to heal from it. The stuff that he did to me caused me to be physically abusive to myself for years.” 55

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Recently, Tori found herself bawling to her fiancé about the fact that she never got to ask her father why he did the things that he did to her. And yet, despite the pain, she carries affection for Warren’s musical achievements. She loves “Poverty’s Paradise.” She inherited some musical aptitude of her own, having taken drum lessons when she was ten and guitar lessons briefly in high school. But she won’t pursue a career in music. “Being around him for as long as I did—it helped me to see the darker side of the music industry,” she says. “And it pushed me away. I’ve had people approach me about being an artist, and every time I think about my dad and I’m like, no. I can’t do that. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” In early 1994, Warren died of a massive stroke and heart attack. “A combination of alcohol and his love of fried chicken,” Vicki theorizes. He was only fifty, and had gotten married for the fifth or sixth time just two months prior.* Tori describes his death as a dying star. “You know how a dying star will burn very brightly? And it burns so brightly that it’s burning itself out? I feel like that was my dad.” His death was mourned quietly, without much fanfare. He was buried in a small cemetery outside a church in Georgia,

*Even Tori—Warren’s own daughter—isn’t sure how many marriages he had. “I know of four in total,” she says. Likely, the number is higher: Vicki believes he was married three different times after Hearn. Similarly, it’s almost impossible to ascertain how many children Warren fathered. “He was a thug. He had three or four families around America,” says Everson-Price, his thensister-in-law. “And they did not know about each other until after he died.”

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near where he had lived at the end of his life. Manchurian gave the eulogy. Warren’s parents, devout Jehovah’s Witnesses who wouldn’t enter any other religious establishment, did not attend. It’s hard to say whether 24-Carat Black was on his mind during his final years. Vicki says he spoke about them on occasion and remained quite proud of the album; Tori remembers seeing some of the original sheet music lying around as a child. But her father never played the group’s music for her when he was alive. Warren had lived long enough to witness a first wave of crate-diggers resurrect his long-neglected masterpiece, but it’s unlikely he knew it: hip-hop was not on his radar. “I don’t think he was conscious of the resurfacing during the time that he was alive,” says Vicki. According to her, the man had an eerie fatalistic streak. “He had a precognition that he was going to die at fifty. Because he told me that when I met him. He said he couldn’t wait ’till he turned fifty, because he would have reached his maturity.” Tori was ten when he died. Since then, she has familiarized herself with her father’s work. Sometimes she hears it in the wild and has a flash of recognition. These moments are emotional. “Whenever any of his music plays—even if I don’t know that it’s his—it hits me a certain way,” she says. “It hits my soul.”

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2 In the Ghetto If you purchased Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth in 1973, you would have been greeted by one of the most mysterious, murky record covers in Stax history. Much of the visual real estate is absorbed by sheer black matter. In the center is a glowing, gold-tinted outline of a man’s face. Above are the words “THE 24-CARAT BLACK,” rendered in outlined white type. (Even the font is rare; according to a blog that specializes in such matters, it’s called “Dominante.”42) Nowhere would you have found any glimpse of what the band looked like, a packaging decision that surely enhanced 24-Carat Black’s aura of mystery and enigma. The cover photograph is credited to a Memphis photographer named Frederick Toma, who unfortunately doesn’t remember much about it. Reached by email, Toma says: “Unlike most of [the] covers I did for Stax, I had no contact with the group 24-Carat Black and was unfamiliar with their music. The theme for the photograph was probably an idea from the art director and just a generic concept. I wish I had something more to offer. But there is no story behind this album cover.” By contrast, the sheer volume of information on the back cover is overwhelming. It lets you know you’re in the presence 59

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of an album that required a staggering number of musicians to create. (In what universe does a debut funk album credit three violists and an oboist?) In addition to the instrumental credits, there is a gracious thank you to Al Bell (“for his productive insight and guidance within this album’s concept”), as well as Virginia Talbert, Clarence Campbell, and Gerri Estes (the owner of a local studio where Warren worked). Warren, of course, is credited as producer and arranger. Then, suitably intrigued, you’d have set aside your copy of On the Corner or Talking Book, placed Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth on the turntable, and hit play. This chapter is intended as a guide to what you would have heard.

1. Synopsis One: “In the Ghetto/God Save the World” Ghetto never feels more like a soul opera (a phrase commonly, though somewhat nebulously, attached to it) than in its first five minutes. I say nebulously because, unlike certified rock operas Quadrophenia or Jesus Christ Superstar, Ghetto doesn’t exactly have a discernible plot or cast of characters. Of course, there’s a unifying concept—life in the inner city—but it functions less as a storyline than as a continuous plea for redemption. And yet Ghetto opens with all the trappings of an opera or Broadway play: a dramatic overture, delivered in the form of some spooky keyboard arpeggios. Those fade out quickly, replaced by an elegant, gradually unspooling piano theme performed by Warren himself. 60

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Needless to say, it’s not a typical start to a Stax-era funk album. Ghetto is often described as one of soul music’s firstever concept albums. That’s true, and there’s really no antecedent for it, although it’s worth noting that Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On—undoubtedly a concept album— preceded it by two years.* This first track is split into two distinct parts. The first, “In the Ghetto,” is a bleak, spoken-word monologue cataloging the myriad horrors of life in the ghetto—desperate prostitutes, strung-out junkies, distraught mothers, rats running rampant—with a novelist’s flair for macabre detail. It’s a genuinely haunting account of life among the condemned. Towards the end, the speaker’s voice takes on an eerie echo that causes each word to reverberate with grim finality: “Good news for the upper masses / The cost of living is cheaper / More blues for the lower classes / They . . . lost . . .” That’s a young Kathleen Talbert delivering the monologue, which was written by Warren. “He presented me [with it],” Talbert says. “To me, it was all about how I felt when I did it. If I didn’t feel it, then I wouldn’t have done it.” If you close your eyes, it’s easy to envision this monologue setting the scene at the start of a Blaxploitation film. The song then morphs into a bluesy shuffle for “God Save the World,” a rollicking gospel plea dominated by Hearn’s wailing cries for deliverance. This number has a rowdy, *Another soul oddity sometimes mentioned in the same breath as Ghetto is Victim of the Joke?: An Opera, a bizarre 1971 album by Stax songwriter David Porter. It’s a soul opera, with segments of dialogue linked to a fairly dull romantic storyline. It was arranged, of course, by none other than Dale Warren.

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doomsday urgency as Hearn calls on a higher power to rescue us from greed, self-destruction, nuclear holocaust, and other sinful discontents. The band often ended shows with this song. It remains unbearably relevant today. “I wish we could rerelease ‘God Save the World,’ ” Hearn says. “It’s time for it.” Notable Samples Gangsta Blac – “Powder” (1996), Naughty by Nature – “Nothin’ to Lose (Naughty Live)” (1997), Metro Boomin (feat. Travis Scott, Kodak Black, and 21 Savage) – “No More” (2018)

2. “Poverty’s Paradise” The album’s unusual sequencing was likely one of many reasons Ghetto seemed so daunting and unapproachable to radio DJs. In those days, it was common for ambitious or unwieldy albums to ease you in with the more commercial tracks first. (Prince’s 1999 is a fine example: “1999” and “Little Red Corvette” light up your pleasure centers before “Let’s Pretend We’re Married and “Automatic” plunge you into the sex-freak deep end.) Ghetto doesn’t do this at all. If anything, it’s sequenced in the opposite fashion—the album opens with its lengthiest and most despairing material, while up-tempo songs like “Foodstamps” and “Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth” are placed towards the end. “Poverty’s Paradise,” however, is the bleakest song of all. Making this the second track on your first album 62

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is an absolute flex, and one that likely didn’t do 24-Carat Black any favors commercially. “Poverty’s Paradise” is a brooding, downcast opus about the unbearable indignity of being poor. Not just the shame and self-pity—though that’s evoked plenty—but also the aching physical discomforts of long-term poverty. Hunger and food insecurity are a recurrent motif throughout Ghetto, particularly so here. “It seems to me like ever since I was a little child / I’ve been starving,” Ernest Lattimore murmurs over a gloomy keyboard refrain. “I’ve never known anything but hunger.” Across the song’s nearly thirteen-minute runtime, Lattimore chronicles a litany of day-to-day grievances: pain, neglect, belly wrinkles from hunger, struggling to keep babies fed. “Down life’s long and lonely road / Poor has been my one and only load,” he declares, yet the lush orchestral accompaniment—big, cinematic string embellishments that wrap themselves around the words—creates a deliberate contrast with the theme of scarcity. Hell, this music sounds downright expensive. There are cellos, violins, piano—and Warren himself plays viola on the track, which is Ghetto’s surest embodiment of his classical pedigree. Then, around the seven-minute mark, the strings and drums pair back, carving room for church organ, wah-wah guitar, and a mounting sense of desperation. There are two lead singers on “Poverty’s Paradise”— Lattimore and Princess Hearn—yet it doesn’t remotely resemble a conventional duet. They are not exactly singing with each other, but around each other: Lattimore narrates the material conditions of impoverishment; Hearn conveys 63

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its emotional dimension with an unending series of wails and moans. Hearn’s performance gives the song its operatic weight. Listen to the way she stretches and mutates the final syllable of the word “Poverty,” illustrating its full array of pain and exasperation. (This most notably occurs around the one-minute mark.) Then, near the song’s conclusion, her voice cracks into an anguished scream. “That song was way before its time,” Manchurian says. Indeed, even 24-Carat Black themselves weren’t amenable to “Poverty’s Paradise” when Warren first introduced the material. “I know it caught everybody off guard,” Steels says. “It was heavy. Real heavy. I just think everybody wasn’t ready to be that heavy.” Today, the song is indispensable. Rap producers commonly gravitate towards “Poverty’s Paradise,” but not because it has tight breakbeats or convulsive grooves to offer. Truthfully, it’s the least funky track on this record. Instead, generations of rappers, from Naughty by Nature to Kendrick Lamar, have feasted upon its spooky textures and desperate-sounding vocals to accentuate downbeat material of their own (and don’t discount the evocative potential of those morose arpeggios at the start of the song). Notable Samples Naughty by Nature – “Poverty’s Paradise” (1995), Monica feat. Treach – “Ain’t Nobody” (1995), Three 6 Mafia – “In-2Deep” (1996), Three 6 Mafia, “Lock Down” (2000), RZA – “The Birth” (2003), Yo Gotti – “Cold Blood” (2013), The Game – “Bloody Moon” (2014), Kendrick Lamar – “FEAR” (2017) and “The Heart Part 4” (2017), Cypress Hill – “Pass the Knife” 64

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(2018), Freddie Gibbs/Curren$y/The Alchemist – “No Window Tints” (2018)

3. “Brown-Baggin’ ” The first of three instrumentals, “Brown-Baggin’ ” is bouncy and light: everything “Poverty’s Paradise” is not. Like “24-Carat Black (Theme),” this one emerged from a jam. Yet it never comes off as perfunctory or sloppy. There’s a deliberateness to the arrangement, a purposefulness in the way certain instruments enter and drop out at just the right moment. (Perhaps an aural document of just how tight the band was following those marathon six-hour rehearsals with Warren.) Ghetto is not a particularly guitar-heavy record, but “Brown-Baggin’ ” is guitarist Ernest Lattimore’s moment to shine. For most of its seven-minute runtime, the song centers around an arpeggiated guitar melody with a sing-song-y cadence. It’s an up-tempo refrain, unmistakably major-key. Once the drums and horns enter the fray—the latter taking the form of one highly syncopated staccato jolt every measure—the song takes on a jaunty, even cheerful radiance. (This is the same group that did “Poverty’s Paradise”?) It even resembles incidental music from a film soundtrack, not unlike the Blaxploitation soundtracks every big soul star was dabbling in at the time (Isaac Hayes’s Shaft, James Brown’s Black Caesar, etc.). The song soon becomes a vehicle for Billy Talbert to stretch out on a chirpy organ solo. Talbert was not yet eighteen, but his skills were central to the group’s sound; 65

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several members describe him as a child prodigy. “Billy Talbert was a little genius,” Clarence Campbell tells me. In fact, Campbell claims that Talbert was more actively involved in co-writing the songs than the writing credits indicate. “Dale took the credit of a lot of stuff that he shouldn’t have if he was fair,” he says. “But he was not fair.”* (Talbert declined to be interviewed for this book.) Four and a half minutes in, the song downshifts into a menacing, bass-led groove. There is a spiky bass solo. That insistent guitar refrain drops out during this section, only to reemerge in the left channel during the track’s long fadeout. (Listen carefully during the fadeout; you can hear Lattimore mutating that riff through a wah-wah pedal—a foreshadow of the “Mother’s Day” wah-wah textures to come.) As for the title, “I think that came about when Dale and I was just talking and shooting the breeze,” says Campbell. “I used to take my lunch to work in a brown paper bag. We didn’t have no lyrics. It was instrumental. So that’s when we started calling it ‘Brown-Baggin.’ ” The song is one of the least-sampled tracks on Ghetto. That could be because the chirpy vibe is a turnoff for hardgroove aficionados; there’s none of the eerie, desperate atmosphere that often attracts rap producers. Also, while “Foodstamps” essentially delivers a proto-hip-hop beat in funk-rock wrapping, this song’s rhythm is closer to a bluesy shuffle—not as gritty-sounding, nor as fun to rap over. (WhoSampled.com claims that Kid Rock’s 2001 song “Baby Come Home” uses the guitar riff, but at best, it’s an *For the record, Manchurian also claims to have co-written “Brown-Baggin.’ ”

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interpolation—not a direct sample. And the similarity may be coincidental.) Notable Samples Kid Rock – “Baby Come Home” (2001), Bvana Iz Lagune & Mikri Maus – “Poternice” (2012)

4. Synopsis Two: “Mother’s Day” What is this song exactly? An interlude? An intermission? An introductory sigh before “Mother’s Day”? It’s more like a title theme. In the vinyl age, the brief track served as an overture to the record’s second side, and perceptive listeners may have noticed that it contains a direct callback to the spidery keyboard arpeggios that opened the record. This is reflected in the unusual titling scheme: “Synopsis One” and “Synopsis Two” are both variations on the same musical theme. If those titles look a bit pretentious to the eye, it’s not an accident—Warren was deliberately imbuing Ghetto with the sophisticated air of an opera or a Broadway musical, with overtures, recurring motifs, and the like. (Today, nothing screams “concept album” like a recurring musical motif, but in 1973 concept albums were still a relatively novel form, at least outside the rarefied world of prog-rock.) “Synopsis Two: Mother’s Day” is by far the shortest (and, perhaps consequently, the least-sampled) track on Ghetto, but there’s a remarkable amount of sonic depth packed into its two minutes and eight seconds. The ominous keyboard figure from “Synopsis One” makes a return, but this time it’s 67

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accompanied by a thumping, syncopated bassline and an airtight beat that sounds like something Questlove might have cut in the 1990s. Then the vocals, faint at first, slide into aural view: a gospel chorus of women’s voices. The only intelligible lyric is “Papa’s coming”—an ever-repeating mantra—but it’s the wordless tapestry of disembodied wailing that has the most haunting effect. The song fades out too quickly to feel like more than a prelude to “Mother’s Day,” but what a prelude it is. (It’s one of only two tracks that are shorter than six minutes.) If you play “Synopsis Two” for a certain stripe of 1990s hip-hop head, they’ll experience an immediate jolt of recognition, since Nas and Dr. Dre liberally lifted the hook for 1996’s “Nas Is Coming.” Millions of people bought the album that song appears on, It Was Written, but few of them know the song’s direct ancestor is 24-Carat Black. Notable Samples Nas (feat. Dr. Dre) – “Nas Is Coming” (1996)

5. “Mother’s Day” In the 1970s and 1980s, welfare recipients sometimes referred to the first of the month—the day the welfare check would arrive—as “Mother’s Day.” The earliest reference to this I’ve seen is in a 1972 New York Times story describing the phenomenon of “Welfare Check Day” in the South Bronx, a scene marked by groups of women gathered outside their tenements. “They were waiting for the mail,” author Michael 68

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T. Kaufman writes, “for yesterday was check day, or what city social workers and the police cynically call ‘mother’s day,’ that twice-monthly period when about $107 million in welfare payments are disbursed in the city.”43 It wasn’t just social workers who called it that. In 1986— long after Ronald Reagan popularized the derogatory cultural trope of the “Welfare Queen”—CBS aired a special report titled The Vanishing Family—Crisis in Black America. The special largely consists of television journalist Bill Moyers interviewing young African-American mothers in inner-city Newark. In one scene, Moyers describes how, on the first of each month, “the mothers gather outside the project’s mail room, waiting for the postman to deliver their checks.” “We call it ‘Mother’s Day,’ ” a twenty-three-year-old woman raising two kids in poverty says onscreen. “’Cause us mothers, we getting our check that day, getting [our] welfare checks.”44 This piece of inner-city slang was likely the inspiration for “Mother’s Day,” one of 24-Carat Black’s longest and most astonishing compositions. The song is a vivid cataloging of grievances associated with urban neglect. Its primary refrain—sung in a smoldering wail by Princess Hearn, whose voice rises in pitch as it increases in urgency—evokes the ways in which a poor person’s wellbeing and survival are tied to the rhythms of a bureaucratic calendar: “Mother’s Day is coming now / Food stamps on the way.” It is perhaps the most overtly political song on Ghetto, an album hardly lacking in overtly political gestures. Across nearly ten minutes, “Mother’s Day” casts its unsparing gaze on rising taxes, welfare birth rates, crooked politicians, housing woes, and an unnamed city tumbling into bankruptcy 69

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and disrepair. “No money to be found / To clean up the bankrupted town,” Hearn sings—two years before President Gerald Ford famously refused federal bail-out dollars to a flailing New York City. Musically, “Mother’s Day” summons the requisite urgency to match this imagery. It starts small, with a delicate and haunting keyboard refrain. This central melody guides the entire song, even as it erupts into an increasingly frenetic avant-funk emergency. Many individual elements contribute to the sense of roiling apocalypse—those one-note horn blasts (later immortalized in Jay-Z’s “Can I Live II”), Larry Austin’s increasingly agitated bass palpitations, and of course Hearn’s lead vocals, which reach a kind of hysteria around the five-minute mark. Songs on this album tend to transform around the midway point, which is where “Mother’s Day” downshifts into a skeletal bass-and-keys vamp, its eerie aura emphasized by the recurring refrain of “Mother’s Day!” in the left channel. (Notice how this mid-song shift is signaled with the same echoing hi-hat effect that closes out “Poverty’s Paradise.”) From there, the drums and horns kick back in with a vengeance, and the band rides out the groove for a raucous finale. After it ends, the bass and keys keep on vamping for one sublime extra minute, and you want them to keep going forever. Producers who sample “Mother’s Day” are commonly drawn to its keyboard melody, which has an evocative resonance and has shown up on tracks by C.L. Smooth and Wale, among others. Yet the song’s most famous sample credit, on an early Jay-Z cut, centers around its aggressive horn part. 70

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Ernest Lattimore cites this song as his favorite on the album. Unfortunately, that’s because he still relates to it. “It’s still going on,” he says. “First of every month is Mother’s Day, food stamps on the way. I even got a packet of food stamps coming this month, too. Every little bit helps.” Notable Samples Jay-Z – “Can I Live II” (1996), Nipskcab Fam – “Fam Members Only” (1996), Diplo – “Krunk Epistomology” (2002), Cor Veleno – “Un Mestiere Qualunque” (2004), C.L. Smooth – “CL Smooth Unplugged” (2006), Wale – “The End Credits” (2008), Skreintax – “Mothers” (2008), Jae Millz – “Mother’s Day” (2009), Roc ‘C’ – “Roses Die” (2011)

6. “Foodstamps” Much as “Brown-Baggin’ ” resets the mood after the unrelenting heaviness of “Poverty’s Paradise,”“Foodstamps”— the second of three instrumentals—does the same after “Mother’s Day.” It is, contrary to its title, an undeniably upbeat tune. And it kicks off with one of the all-time great funk breakbeats: a syncopated stutter-step that’s made all the more funky by the way Steels raises the hi-hat ever so slightly on the downbeats.* *It’s worth noting that this is the only straight-up unaccompanied breakbeat on the album. Although Ghetto is sometimes described as “a source of breakbeats”—as on the group’s Wikipedia entry—that’s slightly misleading; most samples from this record are highly melodic in nature, and contain more than just drums.

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This technique anticipates the subtle hi-hat wizardry that would become central to countless hip-hop beats years later, as epitomized on the endlessly sampled “Impeach the President” by the Honey Drippers (also from 1973). Steels’ bandmates enter one at a time, building on the energy and precision of that breakbeat. First come the staccato horns, bleating like a car horn, then some atmospheric organ, slow-fading bass, guitar in the left channel, and finally a playful little keyboard melody. Around the 1:40 mark, the horns drop out, only to reenter for two octave-plummeting blasts at the start of every fourth measure. Then a devilish, wailing sax solo—performed by Gregory Ingram—emerges as the song’s secret weapon and continues unabated for more than three remarkable minutes, lifting the song’s intensity level like a thermostat. (Check out those Coltrane-esque “sheets of sound” during the final minute.) The whole thing fades out at the six-and-a-halfminute mark; one wonders how long the band carried on for on the original reel. While the other two instrumental numbers on this album emerged from jams, this one, according to Bowman’s liner notes, stayed “fairly close to Warren’s initial concept.”45 Presumably, Warren also selected the title. Even though there are no lyrics, the song’s title connects it to the larger themes of hunger and desperation. Food stamps—meaning the federal aid program that provides food-buying assistance to low-income Americans— are a prominent motif on Ghetto, mentioned explicitly in both “Poverty’s Paradise” (“No amount of food stamps can ease sorrow”) and “Mother’s Day.” The program had 72

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been permanently established only a decade prior, as part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” By the late 1960s, food program policies had become a hot-button political issue, with then-president Nixon issuing a hollow promise to “put an end to hunger in America itself for all time.”46 In terms of samples, most producers are only interested in this song’s first few seconds: the beat, most famously employed by Digable Planets. But recently, Homeboy Sandman, a Queens rapper, rhymed over a larger chunk of the song—guitar, horns, everything—on his 2019 track “Name.”* The rapper explains the sample in a very terse email: “was unfamiliar with 24-Carat Black before Von Pea rapped over ‘Foodstamps’ on a 2 Hungry Bros grooves mixtape. Listened to them more since then they’re remarkable. Work well in a sampled context because their music is amazing and rich and lush exactly the type of ish cats want to rap over for atmosphere and texture and vibe.” Notable Samples Digable Planets – “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” (1992), Psyche Origami – “The Wharf Song” (2005), Wale – “The End Credits” (2008), Big Remo (feat. Tyler Woods) – “Nothing’s Gonna Stop” (2010), Jonwayne – “Silent Night” (2018), Homeboy Sandman – “Name” (2019)

*This song appears on Homeboy Sandman’s 2019 album Dusty. However, the rapper previously rhymed over the same sample on a 2011 track called “I Knew.”

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7. “Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth” A great title track has a lofty job. It’s tasked with crystalizing the themes and approach of a larger work and cutting it down to size. “Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth” certainly accomplishes this. It condenses all the anguish and indignation of its parent album within the confines of a 3:45 runtime and a groove so hard it could chop ice. Even if you find Ghetto too depressing (and many do*), this song is despair rendered irresistibly funky. If 24-Carat Black has a signature song, this is it. Musically, it’s a highly agitated jazz-funk maelstrom. Its immaculate groove rests upon the syncopated tension between the thumping bass and the chatterbox horns. But there’s so much rich sonic detail lingering around the margins (like that bizarre organ fade around the 2:52 mark) that a producer could swipe any three-second sample of the song and get something different each time. There’s also a spiky quality to the instrumental performances that makes the song pop. Every part is pure staccato angularity. Of course, the main attraction is that haunting, desperate vocal hook—“Ghetto! In the ghetto”—which occurs throughout the song, glistening with both pain and defiance. Thanks to Eric B. & Rakim, it’s probably the most iconic hook on the album, commonly sampled by rappers who are seeking to evoke similar themes of inner-city unrest. According to *After his first listen, Mark Prindle, the veteran internet music reviewer, described it like this: “It makes There’s a Riot Goin’ On sound like an Eddie Murphy album!”

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Steels, the lead singer, Valerie Malone, was only fourteen or fifteen when this was recorded. Her vocal performance hits hard enough that it’s easy to forgive clunky rhymes like “Poor struggles are sad / Cuz being poor is bad.” The song’s narrator is a ghetto occupant who yearns to escape: “Pulling up on my bootstraps, got to step right on / Ain’t sittin’ on welfare’s lap no more, got to push on.” Between its reasonable length and its faint glimmer of uplift, “Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth” is the closest thing to a conventional protest song on the album. The target of protest, though, is more abstract than a corrupt president or unjust war. It’s the full conglomeration of capitalist forces that both created the ghetto and helped keep African-Americans trapped there. As the critic Joe Tangari wrote in 2010, 24-Carat Black’s music encapsulated “a moment when the Civil Rights movement had achieved most of its tangible goals and had to contend with harder things than laws, like ingrained prejudice and systemic inequality.”47 As for the singer, Malone’s current whereabouts are a mystery. Hearn believes she is still alive, but “no one seems to know where she is.” Fitting, perhaps, that the singer of Ghetto’s eeriest hook seems to have vanished into thin air. Notable Samples Eric B. & Rakim – “In the Ghetto” (1990), Young Disciples – “Step Right On” (1991), D.A.M.N. – “Introlosophy II” (1991), Raw Breed – “Ghetto” (1997), Scarface – “The Geto” (1998), Madlib – “6 Variations of In The Rain” (2001), Jill Scott feat. Common – “High Post Brotha” (2001), DJ Cam – “Ghetto Supastar” (2004), Nas and DJ Green Lantern – 75

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“Ghetto (Remix)” (2008), Termanology – “Nobody’s Smilin” (2009)

8. “24-Carat Black (Theme)” If Ghetto were a movie soundtrack, “24-Carat Black (Theme)” would be the music that plays over the end credits. It’s the third instrumental jam, but this one has an air of finality to it—as though the musicians are satisfied they’ve made their point about the bleak state of the world and will now proceed to dance you out into the night. And any listener with a pulse can dance to this one. It begins with a slippery bass lick, which locks in with Steels’ drumming to form a tight groove that predicts the low-end jitteriness of 1990s drum & bass music. The other players join the fray one-by-one—a bit of staccato guitar, some organ arpeggios filling in around the edges. Eventually, a halfstepping horn fanfare nudges its way into the mix, forming a rousing call-and-response routine with the lead guitar. Just past the three-minute mark, Steels unleashes a fierce drum fill, and that’s where the track’s intensity really rises: the bass gets busier, the horns more frenetic. This brass cacophony—reminiscent of the “Memphis sound” epitomized by Otis Redding a decade prior—pulls back just long enough to allow Lattimore to take a bluesy guitar solo. (Even when soloing, he keeps his guitar on a clean, undistorted tone.) Then the horns return for a slowly ascending solo of their own. But just after the groove heats back up to its previous level of urgency, the song abruptly fades out. And then that’s 76

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it. Ghetto is over. As bleak as this record is, don’t forget that it ends with a party. According to Steels, the song grew from a jam, which is apparent from the looseness of the performance. “We didn’t have the full arrangement [before recording],” Steels says. “We kind of finished the arrangement as we were playing.” Notably, it’s the only song on the album for which Warren shares the songwriting credit with specific other members of the group. In the CD track listing, the credit reads thusly: “Warren – 24-Carat Black, arr: William Talbert – Gregory Ingram.” In recent years, some perceptive listeners have observed a striking similarity between this song and Can’s krautrock classic “Vitamin C”—particularly the near-identical spiky basslines that anchor both grooves. “It’s the same groove,” insists DJ and 24-Carat Black fan Rev Shines. (The Can track is actually a bit faster, and the key is a half-step higher.) It’s worth noting that Ghetto was recorded in late 1972 or early 1973—mere weeks after Can’s album Ege Bamyasi hit shelves. Whether the parallels were coincidental or not remains one of many unsolved mysteries in the 24-Carat Black story. Still, the similarity was noteworthy enough to have sparked a lengthy debate on Soul Strut, a popular internet forum for record collectors, in 2009. One user, posting under the handle “MANNYBOLONE,” went so far as to email Bruce Thompson, the band’s later music director. Thompson was unfamiliar with “Vitamin C” but, according to MANNYBOLONE’s post, wrote back after listening to it: “Amazing! It seems more than similar. There is the poss[ibility] that the bass player himself heard this track and 77

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it influenced his playing. Had Dale heard this track he would have evaded the simularity [sic].” Evidently riveted by the mystery, the same user then shared the two songs with a musicology professor, who remarked: “It’s hard to believe that this is coincidence—that minor-key arpeggiated riff is not that common a gesture in soul.”48 When I mention all this to Steels, he is bewildered. He has not heard the Can track. “Larry [Austin], our bass player, came up with that line,” he says of the “24-Carat Black (Theme)” riff. “Dale didn’t come up with that line. He might have heard Can—I don’t know.” Austin, sadly, died in 2016. The mystery, it seems, must remain unsolved. Notable Samples H.E.A.L. feat. Ms. Melodie – “Anti-Ho” (1991), Keith Murray – “Herb Is Pumpin’ ” (1994), El-P – “Dead Disnee (Remix)” (2002), Dynas – “Family Jewels” (2009)

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3 Rebirth The improbable rebirth of 24-Carat Black began in the same obscure crevices where records go to die: bargain bins, flea markets, thrift stores, a parent’s dusty and neglected LP collection. By some twist of fate, these were the same places where savvy producers and rappers went digging for samples, and where some of them found a mysterious LP with an inky-black design. The most consequential example involves Eric B. & Rakim, the profoundly influential hip-hop duo whose first album, 1987’s Paid in Full, helped transform the sound of rap, making room for Eric’s floor-rattling beats and Rakim’s swift, nimble rhymes. During the late 1980s, the duo was at work on what would become its third album, Let the Rhythm Hit ’Em, collaborating with outside producers—among them Paul C, who would be mysteriously murdered before the record’s completion, and the 18-year-old Large Professor. Back then, Paul C (born Paul C. McKasty) was a leading producer and early sampling pioneer—as Questlove once put it, he’s the guy “who inspired your fav producer’s favorite producer.”49 Paul could manipulate an E-mu SP-1200 sampler with unstoppable skill. And he’d been crate-digging since his early teens.50 79

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“He had the 24-Carat Black [record],” confirms TR Love of the rap group Ultramagnetic MCs, who was close with Paul. “I don’t know if you understand about digging in old, dusty thrift stores and places to look for records. Sometimes you might come across a record that’s golden because somebody’s family threw out their record collection and it’s been sitting there. We would go to garage sales. Paul would call me on the weekend: ‘Yo, I’m going to go dig! You coming?’ We go downtown; we go in the Village, or we go to Brooklyn or Jersey, and we just go beat-shopping.” Around 1989, Paul C stumbled upon Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth at a flea market in Rockaway, Queens. “He played it for me over the phone and was like, ‘Yo, this is tough,’ ” Large Professor recalled in an interview with Complex.51 “It” presumably refers to the haunting refrain of the title track— “Ghetto! In the ghetto”—which became the beguiling hook of Eric B. & Rakim’s 1990 single “In the Ghetto,” the centerpiece of Let the Rhythm Hit ’Em.* In July 1989, Paul C was shot to death in his Queens bedroom. The murder remains unsolved. The Eric B. & Rakim song was recorded sometime after his death, but the producer had left behind a tape containing records he’d planned to sample. It contained the 24-Carat Black track. “Rakim showed up with a cassette, and was like, ‘Yo, [let’s use] this right here,’ ” Large Professor said in the same Complex

*The Eric B. & Rakim song is called “In the Ghetto.” There is also a 24-Carat Black song called “In the Ghetto,” but that’s not the one this song samples. Yes, this is confusing.

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interview. “And I was like, ‘Oh shit, this is that “Ghetto” shit that Paul let me hear one time.’ So I looped it up off the tape right there.” If Paul C had not prepared that tape before his untimely death, this book might not exist. Whether Rakim was familiar with the 1973 album is unclear (neither he nor Eric B. granted me an interview), but the rapper’s steely verses about rising from the streets certainly complemented its themes. And to listeners, the repurposed hook sounded mysterious and distant. “I remember being so blown away by the sound of that song,” says the DJ and beatmaker Rev Shines, who was a teenaged Eric B. & Rakim fan at the time. “Just that crazy vibe that it had. Those eerie vocals: ‘Ghetto!’ ” The first seed of a resurrection had been planted. “In the Ghetto,” which paired that vocal snippet with a beat from a Bill Withers recording, became the first known song to sample 24-Carat Black—the first glimmer that Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth might become more than a longforgotten artifact. But in 1990, only the savviest of listeners could have known the sample source—there was no mention of 24-Carat Black in the liner notes. Back then, before the internet, sample knowledge spread by word-of-mouth. “A friend of mine had the record already,” says Supreme La Rock, a longtime DJ. “We were hanging out one day. The video [for ‘In the Ghetto’] came on TV and he was like, ‘Oh, I have that—that’s 24-Carat Black.’ I said, ‘What the hell is that?’ I went to his place and he found it. I was like, ‘Man, I gotta have this.’ ” Supreme La Rock procured his own copy from a guy who sold records out of his garage. “Nobody knew the record,” 81

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Supreme La Rock says. “The way the culture was at that time, you wanted to keep everything sacred and to yourself. You wanted to have that exclusive record nobody else had as a DJ. I wasn’t running around telling everybody about it.” This culture of secrecy absorbed seasoned DJs like a mafia code. In the 1980s, Jam Master Jay, of Run-DMC fame, sometimes blacked out the titles on records he played with a magic marker so competitors couldn’t steal his beats.52 Meanwhile, in an odd slice of hip-hop serendipity, Paul C’s drum machine was inherited by his brother, Tim McKasty, an engineer who worked with a Bronx rap group called Raw Breed. “I heard the sample out of the drum machine,” says Raw Breed emcee Marc Live. “I was pressing the pads and I heard: ‘Ghetto!’ ”—he mimics the stuttering beat—“and I was like, Oh my God, this is where it came from. This is amazing!” By 1997, Raw Breed had signed to Warner Bros. and was at work with Paul’s old pal TR Love on an album called Blood, Sweat & Tears. On a hard-hitting street narrative titled (appropriately) “Ghetto,” the group used the same 24-Carat Black sample Paul C had unearthed all those years prior—except the result was entirely different. While Eric B. & Rakim’s “In the Ghetto” retained the steady calland-response cadence of the 24-Carat Black track, Raw Breed’s “Ghetto” loops just the titular phrase into an aggressive chant. There’s another difference, too. “If you listen to the ‘Ghetto’ record that Raw Breed did, the drums are snapping. That’s why it hits so good,” says TR Love. “As opposed to the Paul C version, where the drums are just fitting in the groove. They’re not out front.” 82

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As this quote suggests, TR Love’s recollection of events differs slightly from Large Professor’s: he believes Paul C did have a chance to chop up the 24-Carat Black sample before his death. “I would think Paul was the first to use [24-Carat Black],” he says. “There’s other DJs who probably had the record in their possession, but they just didn’t know how to freak it like he did.” Meanwhile, the secret of 24-Carat Black spread to Europe, infiltrating Britain’s rare groove scene in the early 1990s. That term originated with a DJ and London club regular named Norman Jay, who in the 1980s had launched a radio show called “The Original Rare Groove Show” on a pirate station.53 “Rare groove” soon entered the lexicon as a catch-all phrase to describe the elusive soul, funk, and jazz tracks Jay liked to play on his show. But it also referred to one particular cluster of DJs and club-goers who gravitated towards music of that vintage rather than the more modern dance beats. “It was quite a high music scene in London,” says Femi Williams, a DJ who was active in the warehouse scene. “Shit was being discovered daily. That’s just how we socialized. We would find obscure James Brown records that had suffered a similar fate [as Ghetto]. Maybe artists who recorded just one song.” As for the term itself? “They were rare, and it was groovy music,” Williams says. The rare groove crowd was animated by a spirit of rediscovery: of finding and celebrating gems that perhaps hadn’t found an audience the first time around. You can see 83

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how 24-Carat Black—and other mysterious, long-sampled soul entities, such as Skull Snaps—might fit with that aesthetic. You can also sense how the scene constituted a reaction to the slick, manicured pop of the day. “There were a few older DJs who started to rebel against— you know the shiny ’80s sound? The middle-of-the-road radio sound of the ’80s,” says Williams. “They wanted the gritty music from the ’70s and ’60s. So they started playing it, and the young scene just picked up on it. Obviously things like James Brown, Isaac Hayes, and a whole load of ’70s funk bands and soul bands. But music of theirs that wasn’t really hits. Cutout music. Music that kind of got dropped.” Eventually, Williams landed on Ghetto. He says he found it at a record shop in London called Honest Jon’s. But he wasn’t the only one. “DJs were playing it,” he says. “In fact, bands like the Brand New Heavies and Jamiroquai and Young Disciples were all inspired by that music. [It was] real soul. Very deep. I don’t know if that really got club play. But it definitely used to get played by the heads.” Young Disciples was Williams’ own group, an influential acid jazz outfit he formed with multi-instrumentalist Marco Nelson and singer Carleen Anderson. In late 1990, the group recorded its first and only album, Road to Freedom, an appealing fusion of technicolor funk, hip-hop, and Anderson’s soulful vocals—all of which made it a touchstone for the neo-soul movement. Musically, Freedom draws on a mix of samples and live instrumentation, and—well, you see where this is going: one of its best songs, “Step Right On (Dub),” samples liberally from Ghetto’s title track. Williams had heard Eric B. & Rakim’s track, he says, but that wasn’t what drew 84

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him to 24-Carat Black. “A lot of the samples that the hip-hop people used—we were into those joints anyway.”* A hip-hop fan in 1991 might have listened to “In the Ghetto” and “Step Right On” back-to-back and had no idea they sampled the same track. This is because, unlike most who sample it, Young Disciples didn’t nab the main hook. Instead, “Step Right On” uses a larger but subtler chunk of the original song. First, there’s an artfully looped slice of that percolating bass line and drum groove. Then, a minute later, the song hits us with a heavily manipulated sliver of Valerie Malone singing the words “Got to step right on / Ain’t—,” which disintegrates into record scratches. Only then, around the 3:30 mark, do we get a brief snatch of those agitated 24-Carat Black horns. It is quite a heady collage of elements. Ishmael Butler—the Digable Planets rapper— remembers being impressed. “They were dope back then!” he raves. “And they were huge, too.” Despite the album’s considerable success, Young Disciples dissolved before recording another. Back then, most of 24-Carat Black were oblivious to their music’s resurrection by a burgeoning movement. But Clarence Campbell claims he received a call at some point in the 1990s from a man in England. In his telling, the man asked, “Are you Clarence Campbell affiliated with the group 24-Carat Black?” Campbell answered yes. The man said, “You guys got an underground hit over here in England. If you have two or

*He also insists that Young Disciples cleared the sample—a rarity in those days, before sampling had much of a legal infrastructure.

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three members of your group, you guys can come over like a fat rat here.” The identity of this mysterious caller remains unknown. Obviously, no such reunion would occur.* Nearly 300 miles from London, in Eindhoven, Netherlands, Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth had fallen into the hands of a Dutch rap group called D.A.M.N., or “Don’t Accept Mass Notion.”† The group’s first album, 1989’s Don’t Accept Mass Notion, is sometimes regarded as the first Dutch hip-hop album. Actually, D.A.M.N. was the first English-language hip-hop group in the Netherlands, the group’s MC, Ricardo Leverock, tells me. “[Others] were rapping in Dutch or broken English,” says Leverock, who was raised in Aruba before moving to the Netherlands in 1986. In those days, Leverock loved Eric B. & Rakim. Sometimes he was told he sounded like Rakim—quite a compliment, given the rapper’s legendarily relaxed, fluent delivery. So when he found Ghetto at a record shop—he says he pulled it out at random—he took it home and was startled to recognize the familiar Eric B. & Rakim sample. Leverock had worked out a nifty deal with one of the store clerks. “I had the opportunity to borrow records, search for a sample, record it, and return the record,” he says. “Because

*Bruce Thompson later floated the idea of a reunion in 2012, when he posted this comment on a Facebook thread with other 24-Carat Black bandmates: “a reunion would be great. I have had offers from [Ohio funk groups] Slave and also Lakeside. 2 join them with 24 Carat Black. [. . .] If we reorganize we could get money!!!!!!!” † No relation to the similarly named Kendrick Lamar album.

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sometimes it was an expensive hobby, just buying stuff, if there’s nothing.” This was not nothing. He liked that now-familiar “Ghetto!” wail so much that he looped it and grafted it onto a James Brown drum sample, which became the intro track on D.A.M.N.’s 1991 album Live Positive. Leverock had to record the sample, in primitive fashion, using a tape deck. “We didn’t even have a sampler,” he says. Sampler or no sampler, the distinctly American funk of 24-Carat Black had landed in Europe. Of course, both D.A.M.N and Young Disciples drew on the same 24-Carat Black track as Eric B. & Rakim. For the most part, it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that major producers began to notice other tracks on Ghetto were ripe for sampling. One significant exception: H.E.A.L., a star-studded collaborative project masterminded by KRS-One. H.E.A.L. released a hyperconscious 1991 album that boasts big-name guests like Michael Stipe and Chuck D. On a track called “Anti-Ho,” you can hear Ms. Melodie—who was then married to KRS-One— furiously rapping about female empowerment over the bass groove from “24-Carat Black (Theme).” Eric B. & Rakim’s “In the Ghetto” undoubtedly played an outsized role in Ghetto’s ascent to underground classic. But it didn’t exist in a vacuum. By the end of the 1980s, rap producers were routinely mining Stax-era funk and soul gems for breakbeats. At best, the two genres enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship that reached across generations: producers enjoyed access to a near-limitless cache of tight, funkified grooves, and in return, some hip-hop 87

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kids might be inspired to pick up a copy of The Payback or There’s a Riot Goin’ On.* The duo’s own debut, Paid in Full, with its heavy reliance on James Brown and Funkadelic rhythms, was a significant landmark in the soul-to-hip-hop pipeline. Yet some hip-hop DJs had been culling from Brown’s records since the late 1970s. Grandmaster Flash was one of them: when he got his start, he would study album credits, and he quickly found that James Brown’s drummer, Clyde Stubblefield, was sample manna. “First time I ever heard ‘Funky Drummer,’ I started looking for his name on anything I could find,” Flash explained in his memoir. “If Clyde played on a Lawrence Welk record, I bought it.”54 Brown didn’t care for the sampling (and in fact initiated legal action against Eric B. & Rakim), but the phenomenon boosted his career nonetheless. In the mid-1980s, “his records piled up in dusty cut-out bins and used-record racks throughout the country,” write Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola in Creative License. “Sampling gave his music and career a new life.” It similarly revived interest in George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, whose records were largely out of print by the 1980s. After Clinton’s music was prominently sampled on albums by Public Enemy and De La Soul, major labels saw the value in reissuing his back catalog.55 “Bootsy *Significant shards of this 1971 album by Sly and the Family Stone—with its primitive drum machines and eerie, skeletal grooves—have resurfaced on hip-hop albums as varied as the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, Ghostface Killah’s Fishscale, and countless others.

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Collins, Parliament—all these people had whole new careers,” says Pat Shannahan, a sample clearance expert whose résumé includes the Beastie Boys and The Avalanches. “They were in demand suddenly. A lot of the young people were very curious to hear the original records that were sampled. So they were out buying the original records, if they could find them.” As sampling grew more sophisticated near the decade’s end, Paul’s Boutique, the Beastie Boys’ mind-bending 1989 opus, was the album that crystalized the funk-sample phenomenon (with ample credit to the Dust Brothers, who produced it). It’s an endlessly dense collage that borrows considerable bone marrow from 1970s funk music but uses those riffs and grooves as raw ingredients for an entirely new creature. Many songs boast five, six, even ten individual sample sources. It’s no coincidence that not one but two songs on the album center around bombed-out grooves swiped from druggy 1970s Sly and the Family Stone records. Elsewhere, we get one song built around a nimble Curtis Mayfield bassline (“Egg Man”), one song built around a Donny Hathaway drumbeat (“Johnny Ryall”), one song that immortalizes an outrageously heady groove from an otherwise forgotten Polish-American fusion outfit called Funk Factory, and so on.56 Remarkably, the Dust Brothers had to spend hours looping and synchronizing these samples manually using a primitive mixing board.57 The resulting album’s influence in the sampling universe can’t be overstated. As the producer Madlib stated in 2006, “Paul’s Boutique inspired me to get all crazy with my beats—it just let me know you could do it.”58 89

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The rise of classic albums built from samples can trigger surreal moments of sample recognition. If you’re a rap fan, surely you’ve experienced the thrill of unexpectedly discovering where a sound fragment originated. During my first year of college, I purchased Hot Buttered Soul at a record fair and was blasting it in my dorm room. Midway through the “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic” piano solo, my roommate perked up in shock: “This is in a Public Enemy song!” he exclaimed. Later I realized he was correct—Public Enemy had indeed looped that high-pitched piano snippet for their song “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.” That same year, I took a course in experimental music. When the professor, the great Alvin Lucier, played us Steve Reich’s 1966 tape loop composition Come Out, it took me a minute to realize why it sounded overwhelmingly familiar: the dialogue had been sampled by my beloved Madvillain, the woozy and brilliant 2004 collaboration between producer Madlib and emcee MF Doom. Of course, Steve Reich is not a soul singer, nor a typical sample source. Yet the example typifies how Madlib and other top-tier beatmakers of his generation—DJ Shadow, Prince Paul, and the late J Dilla, to name a few—have earned reputations for seeking out rare and unusual source material. Bored by overly familiar sample sources like James Brown and Steely Dan, Madlib has made an art out of hunting for obscure finds that he can mutate into hazy, off-kilter beats. “Most of the time I buy stuff I don’t know just so I can hear something new,” the enigmatic producer recently told Pitchfork. “Mostly Black or European, Chinese. Anything, man. I’ve been around a lot of the world, so that’s where I cop 90

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the most records.”59 No wonder that listening to a Madlib production often feels like surfing between the dusty crevices of his record collection. With a guiding ethos like that, enterprising cratediggers were bound to stumble upon Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth eventually. Of course, Madlib himself has sampled it: his track “6 Variations of In the Rain,” part of a triple-split single from 2001, briefly absorbs that familiar “Ghetto!” wail into its eight-minute morass. When I reach out to ask if I can interview Madlib about 24-Carat Black, the producer’s business partner emails back: “That’s funny. I pulled them up the other day on Spotify and me and him were talking about them. Great album.” Yet my interview request is denied. It seems Madlib’s affinity for vintage extends beyond the musical realm: “He doesn’t have a cell phone and has never replied to an email that I know of,” his partner tells me. “As much as I would love to see this happen, I don’t have the bandwidth to be sending carrier pigeons over to him to ferry replies back.” When Ishmael Butler was working on Digable Planets’ first album in the early 1990s, he was animated by a similar hunger to find cool, unheard records. It was in the air. “If you sampled something that somebody else had already done, it wasn’t really looked at with much respect,” Butler says. “You didn’t have your own sources. You were just copying other stuff. Sounding like other cats. That wasn’t the hit back then.” Unlike Madlib—who went crate-digging in Brazil while making Madvillainy—Butler didn’t have to look too hard to strike vinyl gold: he could just pilfer records from his father’s 91

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suitably eclectic collection. “You don’t have to sugarcoat it,” Butler says. “I stole my dad’s records. I had to sneak ’em out, know what I mean?” This required a bit of stealth. Butler would often visit his father, “and then, while he was gone or at some time when he wasn’t paying attention, I would move out with a couple of the ones I liked,” he says. “He used to be so mad at me when I used to come visit him and leave with fifty records. He was mad, but he wasn’t really. At the time, he was like, ‘Man, what are you doing with my records?’ I was like, ‘I’m sampling, I’m about to make a hip-hop this-and-that!’ He’s like, ‘What is this cat talking about?’ It was so early in that era. After a while, he just accepted that I was probably going to leave with a few records every time I came.” Butler (who went by “Butterfly” in those days) had dropped out of college and moved to Brooklyn in 1989, renting a room from his father’s girlfriend’s mother.60 Digable Planets was the rap group he formed with two friends and fellow rappers: Craig “Doodlebug” Irving and Mary Ann “Ladybug Mecca” Vieira. The three bonded over a shared love of poetry and jazz. In an era when gangsta rap was making headlines and moving units, Digable Planets bucked the trend, specializing in a chilled-out, jazz-inflected approach to hip-hop. Butler’s rhymes felt conversational and relaxed— even when he was rhyming about abortion rights. The group’s 1993 debut, Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space), is a quietly intergalactic masterpiece, awash in Afrofuturism and avant-jazz samples, many of them swiped from Butler’s father’s collection, others from his mother or uncle.61 Jazz is everywhere: the trio name-checks 92

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Mingus Ah Um on “Pacifics” and mourns legends like John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy (one of the elder Butler’s favorites) on “Last of the Spiddyocks.” Scan the record’s sample credits, and you’ll spot jazz titans like Sonny Rollins and Herbie Hancock. Even the album’s unusual title is a jazz homage, a nod to early Miles Davis titles like Cookin’ and Workin’. The surprise crossover hit was “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat),” which, with its thumping bass groove, is the sort of song subwoofers were built for. It even cracked the Billboard Top 20 in early 1993. Production-wise, it’s a masterstroke of sample synergy, borrowing bass and horns from an Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers tune, slowing them substantially, and melding them with an oft-sampled beat from the Honey Drippers’ anti-Nixon protest classic “Impeach the President.” Then, two-and-a-half minutes into the song, there’s an odd instrumental break: the main drum sample drops out, and Butler hits us with a different, crisper beat. This new beat only lasts a few seconds—two non-consecutive measures, to be precise—but it’s unmistakable: that’s Tyrone Steels at the beginning of “Foodstamps.” How fitting for this long-lost funk gem to be resurrected on a song titled, in part, “Rebirth.” Butler had unearthed the Ghetto LP from his dad’s record stash. It spoke to him, all those years later. Especially that razor-sharp drum break. “Everybody was scouring records for drum loops and samples,” he says. “The album was just full of loops. Cuz it was so heavy on instrumentals, and the drummer is so good. That loop was something that I really dug.” He liked the crisp playing, but also the recording quality, 93

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which he describes as “bumpy and warm and subaquatic a little bit. I like that sound they had.” He only used a tiny sliver of the album. But Butler has an unusual theory of sampling. “Just because you take a certain section of the song,” he tells me, “it still holds all the energy from the rest of the song.” The rapper, whose current project is Shabazz Palaces, strikes me as sharp and funny and eminently curious about music. When I contact him out of the blue to ask about this fleeting sample from twenty-five year ago, he calls me almost immediately. He knows exactly which sample I am talking about and can pretty much scat-sing it from memory. He doesn’t know much about 24-Carat Black’s backstory. I tell him about how the album flopped in 1973. “You make your music and you put it out and then, if you don’t go up in the stratosphere, you fail and it’s over,” Butler muses. “But music is alive. Ideas are alive. Once you get done with it, you never know what’s gonna happen with it—who it’s gonna influence, what kind of life it’s gonna have. I try to think about that all the time. They put heart and soul into that. That shit’s gonna always live and have its own life because of the energy they poured into it.”* He still owns his father’s tattered copy of Ghetto, but when he listens to it today, he’s no longer hunting for samples. Now he listens for inspiration as a musician.

*Butler knows something of this subject firsthand: Digable Planets’ second album, Blowout Comb, was a commercial failure in 1994. Now it’s widely regarded as a classic.

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In 1994—the year Warren died—Ghetto was finally issued on CD. It had been rare and out of print for decades. Fantasy Records, which had acquired the Stax catalog in 1977, commissioned music journalist Rob Bowman to write the liner notes. Bowman went above and beyond, with an extensively researched essay that helped demystify 24-Carat Black’s origin story for the first time. He even took note of the sampling phenomenon, then in its infancy. Ghetto “fell on largely deaf ears when released, only to find its grooves sampled years later by such hip-hop artists as Heal,* Young Disciples, and Digable Planets,” Bowman wrote. “The compact disc reissue of this long-out-of-print album serves as a tribute to the genius of its recently deceased creator.”62 Yet Bowman’s immensely detailed 1997 book, Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records, does not mention 24-Carat Black even once. Nor do other published books about Stax. Commercially speaking, Ghetto is not even a nanoscopic blip in the label’s history. Fortunately, the hip-hop world did not see it that way. After Ghetto was made available on CD, the samples kept coming, and they did not stop coming. In 1995, the East Coast rap trio Naughty by Nature not only sampled “Poverty’s Paradise” but named an entire album after it. “Our mission is to turn our poverty into our paradise!” the group declares on its own song “Poverty’s Paradise,” which features prominent snippets of Princess Hearn wailing from—you guessed it— the original “Poverty’s Paradise.” *More commonly stylized as “H.E.A.L,” short for “Human Education Against Lies.”

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Treach, Naughty by Nature’s frontman, says it was the group’s DJ, DJ Kay Gee, who introduced them to Ghetto. Much like Butler, they were hungry to find samples that hadn’t been used. “Nobody was using the same samples,” Treach says. “Unwritten law: you couldn’t. Because you would be looked at as a biter. You biting somebody’s style.” They had visited a record store in Princeton, NJ, and Kay Gee bought every record in the shop. “Every single record,” Treach says. “We had crates, carrying it. Then we started listening to that. We used to just be in the house, in between hustling, just listening to original records. It was like a spiritual retreat. Once we heard that, it was like, ‘Man. This shit is amazing.’ ” In a 1995 interview with Hip Hop Connection, Vin Rock, the group’s other emcee, credited “Poverty’s Paradise” with inspiring their album’s entire concept. “The name of the album it’s on is Ghettos, Misfortune’s, Wealth [sic],” Vin Rock said. “When I heard what she was saying in the song, I felt it described what we went through . . . coming from the poverty side, and getting into paradise. And I was, ‘Yo, that’s a phat title for this album.’ ”63 Naughty by Nature’s 24-Carat Black infatuation would resurface two years later, when the group wrangled the highly cinematic opening of “In the Ghetto” into a high-testosterone track called “Nothin’ to Lose (Naughty Live).” By 1996, the word was out. That year, 24-Carat Black’s music became a secret weapon deployed by hip-hop’s burgeoning new elite—including a twenty-six-year-old rapper from Brooklyn named Jay-Z. One of Jay’s early cuts, a furious blast of braggadocio called “Can I Live II,” centers around a feverish loop of the horns in “Mother’s Day.” While 96

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the song did not initially appear on Jay’s debut, Reasonable Doubt, it surfaced as a bonus track on the 1998 reissue of the album.* (Some sources claim Jay-Z’s 1998 song “Reservoir Dogs” also samples 24-Carat Black, though admittedly I don’t hear it. That album’s liner notes only credit one sample: “Theme From Shaft” by Isaac Hayes.) One week after Reasonable Doubt dropped, Nas, the Queens rapper whose virtuosic flow could turn street narratives into sublime poetry, released his second album, It Was Written. While it hardly matched Illmatic, Nas’s remarkable debut, the album has come to be seen as a touchstone for the Mafioso rap movement. (You try topping Illmatic.) It Was Written starts with a slave rebellion, ends with a utopian fantasy, and right in the middle gives us “Nas Is Coming,” a collaboration with Dr. Dre in which Nas proclaims himself a “rap hero Black De Niro.” (Rappers really like referencing Robert De Niro, but that’s a discussion for another book.) “Nas Is Coming” is interesting for several reasons. For one, it is—according to WhoSampled.com—the only known song to sample “Synopsis Two: Mother’s Day,” the brief interlude on Ghetto, nabbing its winding keyboard line and vocal hook.64 For another, it’s not just a sample. It’s an

*“Can I Live II” is a sequel to the Reasonable Doubt track “Can I Live,” which itself is built around a sample of Isaac Hayes’s “The Look of Love”—also arranged by Dale Warren. A coincidence? Probably. It’s not clear if Jay-Z or his producers were aware of the connective tissue between the two songs. His publicist did not respond to an interview request.

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interpolation—a recreation of the sample. Dr. Dre evidently had new vocalists sing the 24-Carat Black hook, changing the lyric “Papa’s coming” to “Nas is coming.” This refrain functions as a de facto hook in between Nas’s verses. It’s not clear how Dr. Dre, who produced the track, was introduced to 24-Carat Black (through a representative, he declined to be interviewed for this book). For some reason, this sample is the one that sticks in Princess Hearn’s memory. “When we heard that Nas and Dr. Dre [sampled us] on ‘Nas Is Coming,’ it was like, Oh my God!” Hearn says. “To me, it was like something was being rebirthed from the dead. It was like it was coming back alive.” Yet Hearn did not learn about all this until well into the new millennium. In 1996, she had no idea that an album spotlighting her longabandoned music occupied the top slot of the Billboard charts for weeks on end. Nor did she know that “Poverty’s Paradise” was having a real moment. After the Naughty by Nature album came Monica’s lighter-waving “Ain’t Nobody,” which recycled the now-familiar 24-Carat Black sample and even featured Treach. (In case that sentence isn’t ’90s enough already, it also landed on the Nutty Professor soundtrack.) In late 1996, Three 6 Mafia, the rap group best known for their Oscarwinning “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” also sampled “Poverty’s Paradise” on their second album. When I ask Treach whether he believes Naughty by Nature inspired these other acts to hop on the 24-Carat Black bandwagon, he says the word “Definitely” six times in quick succession. Then he compares the Ghetto record to a pancake. “When one side is done”—meaning it has been sampled 98

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already—“you flip the pancake to the other side, but it’s a brand new fresh flavor. And you wouldn’t even know it’s from the same batter.” By the time Jay-Z’s first album arrived in 1996, sample culture had undergone a profound shift. In the early days, it was a wild frontier: there was not much legal infrastructure governing sample licenses, because lawyers and record labels weren’t paying attention. Or they thought hip-hop was just a fad. “Sampling was so new that I don’t think anyone understood there were rights that needed to be licensed,” says Pat Shannahan, the clearance expert. For sample junkies like the Beastie Boys or Public Enemy, this was a license to unfettered creativity. “It was just this magical window of time,” the producer El-P reflected in the book Creative License.65 It’s become a cliché to say that It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back or Paul’s Boutique—towering monuments to sampling as an art form—could not be made today because the licensing fees would be prohibitive.* But it’s true. Paul’s Boutique contains, by one estimate, “between 100 and 300” individual samples.66 In 2011, McLeod and DiCola analyzed

*Chuck D has admitted that Public Enemy didn’t clear the samples on Nation of Millions. By contrast, many of the samples on Paul’s Boutique were reportedly cleared, but at absurdly low cost before today’s byzantine licensing system came into effect (see Tingen, Paul. “The Dust Brothers.” Sound on Sound, May 2005, www.soundonsound.com/people/dust-brothers). In Dan LeRoy’s 33 1/3 about the album, Mike D claims it was the first rap album where “an attempt was made to clear every sample” (LeRoy, 47).

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the record’s known samples and estimated that, if it were legally licensed by today’s standards, the album would cause the Beastie Boys to incur $19.8 million in debt.67 Which of course means it wouldn’t be commercially released at all. The event that changed sampling forever was a 1991 showdown between Biz Markie and soft-rock singer Gilbert O’Sullivan. Markie had used an unauthorized sample of O’Sullivan’s song “Alone Again (Naturally).” O’Sullivan took him to U.S. District Court—and won. Quoting the Seventh Commandment (“Thou shalt not steal”), the judge ruled that sampling without prior permission constitutes copyright infringement. Markie cheekily titled his next album All Samples Cleared! It was a landmark case. Major labels quickly cracked down on unlicensed sampling—Warner Bros. reportedly had a “sample committee” scrutinize albums for unauthorized snippets.68 “No court decision has changed the sound of pop music as much as this,” the Washington Post critic Chris Richards argued in 2012.69 Rappers will tell you this is where everything changed. “When I got my first record contract, I was just like: grab a record, sampling it, not really taking note of what it was,” Butler says. “I had to then go back and try to systematically figure out what I had done and where and let the label know. After that, I kept a little better track of what I was using.” (Look at the liner notes of Reachin’ and you’ll find a disclaimer of the sort that would become increasingly common in the 1990s: “All samples cleared with perfection and verve by the cool humans at diamond time.”) 100

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It wasn’t just that sampling was becoming a hassle. It was also growing exponentially more expensive as rights-holders witnessed rap’s commercial rise. “In the beginning, a record label would do a flat fee buyout for $500, if they just used a guitar lick or a drumbeat,” Shannahan says. “But that ended very soon. And they wanted a lot more money. They wanted to participate in the copyright of the new work and co-own part of it”—meaning a cut of ongoing royalties. “A lot of rappers simply didn’t have the money to do it.” This royalty arrangement is why, for instance, Dale Warren is credited as a cowriter of Metro Boomin’s song “No More,” even though he died when Metro Boomin was in diapers. (It’s also why the members of Steely Dan are credited as co-writers of Kanye West’s song “Champion,” and sole writers of Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz’s 1998 hit “Deja Vu [Uptown Baby].”*) Rampant anti-rap sentiment, often rooted in racist assumptions, didn’t help matters. By the mid-1990s, building a sample-heavy record began to feel more like a logistical headache than a creative enterprise. In Creative License, Posdnuos of De La Soul describes meeting with the record label while making 1996’s Stakes Is High and being given directives like “George Clinton is in litigation with *In exchange for clearing this song’s sample of “Black Cow,” Steely Dan apparently demanded a hefty advance and 100% of the publishing royalties. Although the rap duo agreed to these terms, it exemplifies the sort of rightsholder greediness that caused many producers to steer away from sampling. In Creative License (pp. 161), El-P presents a mock sample negotiation: “Hey, can we use this bass line? Please?” “Yeah, sure, give me all your publishing revenues and give me $10,000.”

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Westbound, so don’t mess with his stuff right now” or “George Harrison don’t like rap, don’t mess with him.”70 “There are some people that have a real bad attitude about it,” Shannahan confirms. “I tried to explain to them over the years that this was a new creative art form. And it did so much to rejuvenate careers of long-forgotten artists and created so many more record sales. It was unbelievable what was happening. A lot of the time when you’re dealing with administrative people, they just don’t get it. They said, ‘Why don’t they write their own stuff! Why do they need to steal?’ ” Today, rap artists are often advised against creating songs with more than one or two samples. (For contrast, Public Enemy’s “Night of the Living Baseheads” contains sonic fragments from about twenty different sample sources.) It’s no great leap to say this new legal reality transformed the sound of rap. Writing for Pitchfork in 2014, the critic Craig Jenkins observed how rap production transformed after the Markie suit: “This is how we arrive at the lush live band pomp of West Coast G-funk, the cold synthetics of early 2000s East Coast rap, and the gothic textures of Southern crunk and trap.”71 “The feeling was out of hip-hop,” Treach complains. “It just started being a couple of producers doing every track sounding the fucking same.” That’s debatable. Still, it’s not a coincidence that several of the most celebrated hip-hop outfits of the late 1990s, including OutKast and The Roots, favored live instrumentation over sampling. In an alternate universe, this would be the part of the book where I tell you that sampling died and nobody has rhymed over 24-Carat Black since 1996. And yet—while acts 102

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like the Beastie Boys were indeed forced to cut back on sampledelia—that’s not what happened. Instead, sampling became the purview of both wealthy, top-tier rappers—like Kanye West, who can afford to license a Nina Simone sample and wants you to know it—and underground artists, who were savvy enough to find obscure sample sources. (Those obscure samples may be affordable to license, or may be unrecognizable enough that you can risk not clearing the sample.) In other words, sample culture moved underground. DJ Shadow’s 1996 trip-hop masterpiece Endtroducing...—which has been cited by Guinness World Records as the first album constructed entirely from samples—is a landmark of this new era. It melds together hundreds of obscure samples, many of which were exhumed from the sunlight-deprived basement of a Sacramento record store, and some of which have never been identified. “I was very much trying to make a statement about, ‘Why are we all abandoning this art form?’ ” DJ Shadow reflected in 2013.72 But the record was not a big seller in 1996, nor issued on a major label, and thus unlikely to attract legal attention. On the flip side, using a highly recognizable sample of a classic song invariably feels like a flex: everyone knows that sample cost a fortune. And Kanye West, ever the humble one, is known for this flex. His songbook is littered with these kinds of luxurious needle-drops: Ray Charles (“Gold Digger”), Otis Redding (“Otis”), Nina Simone (“Blood on the Leaves,” “Famous”). As Richards writes, “West flaunts his samples the same way he flaunts his cars, his clothes, his jewelry, and his art collection.”73 103

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All this explains why 24-Carat Black samples became more, not less, common in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Presumably, the group’s music was relatively affordable to license compared with more high-profile Stax acts. And for those sampling without a license, it was less of a risk—and less easily identifiable.* Sample a James Brown beat without permission, and his high-powered lawyers might come after you. But 24-Carat Black? What high-powered lawyers? By the end of the twentieth century, Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth was an underground classic, revered by record collectors and sample junkies. Its songs cropped up on more than a dozen compilations before 2000. “If you collect records, you’re aware of it,” says Rob Sevier. “If you have any inclination towards soul or what was frequently referred to as rare groove, 24-Carat Black is just a known item.” Rev Shines (born Ryan Shortell), the young DJ who had been blown away by the Eric B. & Rakim track as a teenager, was one of many collectors captivated by it. During the mid-1990s, he was working at Jump Jump Music, a record store in Portland, Oregon. “[Ghetto] was always regarded as a rare find that was hard to come by,” says Jump Jump owner Dan Berkman. Since many pressings sounded terrible—or were worn out by then—mint copies were especially prized.

*It’s impossible to say how many uncleared 24-Carat Black samples are floating around, since artists are understandably reluctant to discuss this. But during my interviews, more than one rap artist admitted off-the-record to having sampled 24-Carat Black without a clearance.

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Because Jump Jump specialized in rare funk and soul vinyl, its clientele included rap royalty on the hunt for samples. Berkman knew what was obscure and sought after. And Shines, a member of the rap group Lifesavas, had an encyclopedic knowledge of sample culture. “He started calling up all my customers, like Easy Mo Bee and Jay Dee,” says Berkman. “Years before the Rap Sample FAQ went online, he was like a walking Rap Sample FAQ.” Shines now had a front-row seat to the crate-to-sample pipeline. “I ended up selling records on a weekly basis to Kenny Dope, Pete Rock, J Dilla, Questlove, The Pharcyde— all these guys,” he says.“A lot of them I had phone relationships with. I would just call them once a week and be like, ‘Hey, I got these five records I think you’d like.’ ” Dilla, the cult hip-hop producer then known as Jay Dee, became a repeat customer. Sometimes he would gravitate towards garishly unhip LPs by Queen or Todd Rundgren, to the clerks’ bewilderment. “He bought probably a couple hundred records while he was here,” says Shines. “Including the Cris Williamson record that he ended up using on the Jaylib album. It wasn’t until a few years later that I discovered that sample and was like, holy shit, I remember seeing that record on the counter, getting rung up in his pile!” Around 1995, Shines developed a fixation with Ghetto. Back then, it wasn’t easy to identify samples. Google didn’t exist. So when a frequent customer gifted him a mixtape by DJ Muro comprising legendary sample sources, he was blown away. He’d long fantasized about tracking down those samples. Naturally, “Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth” was on there. Its parent album quickly became a must-have LP on his 105

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crate-digging expeditions. “Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth was one of the first records I dreamed about owning in the ’90s as a young record junkie,” he says. It wasn’t an easy find— especially in Portland, which has been called the “whitest big city” in America.74 “I would always start by calling every record store,” Shines says. “I remember calling about that record and nobody had it. Most of the record stores didn’t even know what it was.” Still, Shines was determined. Jump Jump routinely advertised in the record collector magazine Goldmine, inviting subscribers to write in for the store’s free mail order catalog or want list. “At some point, Dan and I came up with our ultimate want list of maybe 100 records, to give people an idea of the stuff we were looking for,” says Shines. A mysterious man from Long Island responded by fax (yes, fax). “He had a bunch of the records on our list, including 24-Carat Black. I just jumped on it, like, ‘We’ll take them all.’ ” That man turned out to be David Stein, a record executive and close associate of Beatles promoter Sid Bernstein. Coincidentally, Shines had already planned a trip to Long Island to visit his grandparents, so he swung by Stein’s house, too. “He had, like, every freaking record in his house,” Shines says. “I remember going around and digging, and all the grail soul, funk, jazz records were in there. I would just be pulling whatever, like, ‘How about Harlem River Drive?’ ‘Oh yeah, I have that right here.’ ‘How about Stark Reality?’ ‘Oh yeah, that’s over here.’ ” Shines paid him twenty-five dollars for his copy of Ghetto—“an unplayed promo copy,” he says, “which I still own to this day.” (He was acquiring these records for the store, but Berkman allowed him to buy that one for himself.) 106

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The story illustrates the kind of mystique that Ghetto accrued once it had become embedded in the DNA of 1990s hip-hop—as well as the lengths to which some collectors went to obtain it. “It was a prized possession, man,” Shines says. “It’s safe to say that was the best record I owned at the time, as far as rarity and dopeness, basically.” It also illustrates how, in some circles, Ghetto is more closely associated with the 1990s, when it finally found an appreciative audience, than the era in which it was actually made. Shines says, “I have a friend that refers to these records as ‘’95 Wall Pieces.’ I think what he means is, [in] 1995, the record that you would have on your wall.” He rattles off a few examples, jazz obscurities unearthed by rap’s golden age: Tom Scott’s The Honeysuckle Breeze (famously sampled by Pete Rock & CL Smooth), Weldon Irvine’s Spirit Man (famously sampled by A Tribe Called Quest). “And 24-Carat Black was absolutely one of those records. “The overall sound of these records was the sound of ’90s hip-hop,” Shines adds. “It’s like those guys were put here from another planet to plant those seeds for this future movement of a whole nother genre of music.”

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4 Gone In early 2008, Rob Sevier, the co-founder of Numero Group— the archival record label known for digging up rare and unheard soul recordings—made a startling discovery. There was a second 24-Carat Black album that nobody had ever heard. Well, demos. Rough sketches for a follow-up album— tracked in late 1974, never completed.75 These were the recordings the group’s second lineup had made in Chicago, back when 24-Carat Black was teetering on the brink of collapse. According to Shakir Suleiman, “We ended up doing five albums’ worth of material—both rhythm and horn tracks—in 72 hours.” When the band imploded and Stax went bankrupt, the album got shelved, seemingly for good. Remarkably, the reels had survived—barely. They had been rotting in a Chicago basement belonging to keyboardist/ engineer Bruce Thompson, who’d spearheaded the sessions, for more than thirty years. Sevier couldn’t believe it. “The tapes were in bad shape,” Sevier says. “They were poorly labeled; they were in boxes that didn’t match what it said on the boxes.” He had only discovered them by chance, while visiting Thompson and searching for recordings Thompson had produced by 109

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a different band, Chocolate Sunday. When Thompson mentioned he had unheard 24-Carat Black recordings in his possession, Sevier was initially skeptical—and then stunned. He knew nothing of a second album. “It wasn’t part of the 24-Carat Black story that I had ever heard,” he says. After decades of poor storage conditions in Thompson’s basement, the tapes had been badly degraded. “They were destroyed,” Sevier says. Some tracks—the sad majority—were in an advanced state of decay. They had eroded to the point where only fuzzy snippets of sound were audible. Others were salvageable. Sevier proceeded with no shortage of haste to transfer them. Numero entered into a licensing agreement for the masters and prepared a compilation of lost 24-Carat Black material, a fascinating—if sadly incomplete—glimmer of where the group might have headed had Stax not collapsed. Numero titled it Gone: The Promises of Yesterday, after one of the rediscovered tracks. It’s considerably shorter than Ghetto: four tapes of material were transferred, but only six songs were deemed usable. For this reason, and the obvious fact of Warren’s death, it is impossible to get a full sense of his unfulfilled vision. Released in mid-2009 to a niche audience of soul-savvy crate-diggers, Gone: The Promises of Yesterday nonetheless constituted a remarkable postscript to the 24-Carat Black legend. Steels was shocked. “I thought we were doing demos!” he says. But aside from shaky sound quality, these songs, with their rich, baroque arrangements, don’t sound like your typical demos. And, surprisingly, they sound nothing like Ghetto, either. 110

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Warren had abandoned his sociopolitical sermonizing and instead steered the group towards a suite of troubled love songs, with nary a mention of poverty to be found. From the sassy soul kiss-off of “I Don’t Love You” to the sultry, xylophone-speckled sensuality of “I’ll Never Let You Go” (an astonishing lead vocal by Niambi, who says Warren wanted her to sound like a “kitten-ish, sexy girlfriend type” and lit candles in the studio to set the mood), it presents a dramatically different side of 24-Carat Black. Those particular tracks had been written and arranged by Warren in the 1960s, in wildly different style, for small Detroit labels—the latter by a girl group called the Tiares, the former by Manchurian as “Bobbie Dee.”76 Manchurian gets his own spotlight here, too, doing a twisted Isaac Hayes impression on the tedious twelve-minute breakdown “I Begin to Weep.”* Yet the most captivating track is “I Want to Make Up,” a woozy, disturbing duet-gone-wrong between “Miss Patrice”

*A superior Manchurian epic, “Any Day Now,” was deemed “barely listenable” due to tape decay and left off the release. Fortunately, it later surfaced alongside three other tape-damaged 24-Carat Black orphans—including a cover of Stephen Stills’“Love the One You’re With”—on a picture disc released by Numero in 2013. (This release, titled Acetate, is worth seeking out.) Seven years later, while this book was being finalized, Numero Group released yet another collection of unfinished 24-Carat Black recordings, titled III . This release consists of Warren’s moody, restless demos from the 1980s and features vocals by Princess Hearn, Vicki Gray, and LaRhonda LeGette. Of course, considering 24-Carat Black was long over by the 1980s and Hearn was the only group member performing on these tracks, it’s not clear that Warren ever intended to release these songs under the 24-Carat Black name.

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(Everson-Price), who portrays a pleading, desperate lover, and Steels, who delivers a chilling, sleazy-voiced rebuff and who, by the end, explodes in a rage: “I’m gone! I’m gone!”* His voice has a distant, spectral quality, a cross between a phantom and a pimp. The song’s dirge-like tempo and otherworldly harmonies give it the air of a torch song beamed down from Mars. “That song has always been, to me, the most mind-blowing discovery,” says Sevier. “It’s emotionally wrenching. There’s just nothing that can be compared to it.” Although it didn’t sell well, Gone garnered considerably more press than Ghetto had thirty-six years prior. It was praised by Pitchfork, which observed that “unlike 24-Carat Black’s one true album, this stuff is approachable on a purely emotional level.”77 Sevier agrees. “I think Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth suffers from being a little pedantic, a little overthought,” he tells me. “What I like about the second record is that it is much rawer. It’s demos that are at a perfect moment in the creative process.” He’s biased, of course. But when I squint, I can see what he means. During the decade leading up to the Numero Group release, 24-Carat Black was embraced by hip-hop royalty at every

*The liner notes mistakenly identify the male voice as Robert Dunson, a pseudonym Manchurian used. Manchurian insists that the voice belongs to Ricky Foster, the trumpet player. However, Steels has confirmed multiple times that it’s him. (Hearn also says it’s Steels.)

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level. Ghetto was a veritable cult classic, the rap building block every rap fan heard, even if few had heard of it. Madlib sampled it in 2001. Jill Scott, in collaboration with Common, sliced up the “Ghetto” bass line that same year on a track called “High Post Brotha.” In 2002, Def Jux mastermind El-P slowed down the “24-Carat Black (Theme)” groove and doused it in the post-apocalyptic kerosene of his “Dead Disnee (Remix).” And in 2003, RZA drank from the familiar well of “Poverty’s Paradise,” sampling it in his song “The Birth.” (RZA has a demonstrated fondness for “Poverty’s Paradise”—he later placed a substantial chunk of the music in his 2012 martial arts film The Man with the Iron Fists.) One figure who took a particular interest in Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth was Hi-Tek (born Tony Cottrell), the rap producer known for his collaborations with Talib Kweli. “My grandmother had a few records under her phonograph,” Hi-Tek tells me. “I was at my grandmother’s house a lot and I would always play these records. That was the main record I fell in love with... That’s how I started to learn how to sample, because of that record.” In 1998, Hi-Tek co-produced Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star, the soulful collaboration between two rising emcees. In a 2018 oral history, Kweli described the genesis of the song “K.O.S. (Determination)”: “Hi-Tek had made a beat off the sample of [‘Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth’] by 24-Carat Black. We recorded that a year or two before we did the Black Star album.”78 Yet the sample never made it to the album. “I felt like the song needed a little update,” Hi-Tek explains, “and that’s when I chopped up the Minnie Riperton sample.” Thus, 113

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Ghetto narrowly missed inclusion on one of the late 1990s’ hip-hop masterpieces. Years later, Hi-Tek discovered he had a family connection to 24-Carat Black: his father and uncle, Willie and Larry Cottrell, had been founding members of the Ditalians. (Both left the band before Ghetto was recorded.) Hi-Tek learned this purely by chance. “I was in the studio and my pops came to visit me,” he recalls. “I’m like, ‘This record [Ghetto] is really a go-to record. It’s a record I play every once in a while just to catch a vibe.’ Pops was chilling. I played this record and he asked me for the record cover. He started reading; he was like, ‘I know all these people!’ ” The producer was stunned to learn that his father had a not-too-distant connection to an album he’d loved for half his life. This makes Hi-Tek a rare living link between the soul scene that spawned 24-Carat Black and the hip-hop generation that embraced it. He still has his grandmother’s LP. “It’s definitely a lost classic, man,” he says. In the new century, rappers found a loophole in the sampling crackdown: mixtapes. A mixtape (not the kind you made for your crush in college) is like an album. But it’s not commercially distributed, and thus not necessarily vetted for copyright violations. The internet made such nontraditional releases possible. The arrival in 2004 of The Grey Album—Danger Mouse’s head-spinning mashup of The Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s The Black Album—ushered in a new era. Given EMI’s disapproval of Beatles samples, The Grey Album could never be released through legitimate channels. But the album 114

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spread on file-sharing sites, dazzled countless listeners, and was praised in the New Yorker, even as EMI seethed and sent out cease-and-desists.79 A decade prior, Biz Markie’s career was nearly killed by uncleared samples. Now Danger Mouse’s career was being built on uncleared samples. By the late 2000s, rappers like Drake and Asher Roth were routinely releasing their projects for free online, distributing them via sites like DatPiff. It was an appealing way to subvert the major label machine. Yet few artists benefited from the mixtape era quite like Wale, a playful young rapper with a nasal voice and an affinity for pop culture references. In 2008, Wale dropped The Mixtape About Nothing, a widely acclaimed mixtape themed around his obsession with Seinfeld. While the Seinfeld motif may have charmed suburban white kids, Wale didn’t use it as a blanket to insulate himself from difficult subjects: “The Kramer,” for instance, uses the audio of Michael Richards’ infamous racist tirade as a segue into a reflection on the use of the N-word in rap lyrics. The last track, “The End Credits,” employs not one but two 24-Carat Black samples simultaneously: the “Foodstamps” beat grafted onto the keyboard melody from “Mother’s Day.” It’s the only track I’ve ever heard that mashes together two different Ghetto songs. It works—even if it’s a little jarring to hear such bleak music paired with a Seinfeld laugh track. Like most of Mixtape About Nothing, this song was produced by Best Kept Secret, a production duo comprising Craig Balmoris and Julian Nixon. Balmoris says he found the 24-Carat Black album while scouring MP3 blogs, which illustrates how sample culture changed in the new century. 115

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You didn’t have to literally go crate-digging. You could just go online. “In the Blogspot era, they weren’t cracking down on music too heavy,” says Balmoris. “People would have whole Blogspots dedicated to uploading vinyl. It was almost like Tumblr, where you could search terms and hashtags. I would always search for years—between, like, 1973, 1974, 1975 . . . And then I found this blaxploitation Blogspot.” Why those particular years? “Genres were being fused at a high level during that period,” Balmoris says. “New synths came into the picture. New technology was being created. Soul and funk was fusing with jazz.”* That blaxploitation blog was where he found a link to download Ghetto. He’d struck gold. “I was like, oh man. It was like a magnum opus,” Balmoris says. “I made beats out of

*Balmoris might be onto something. “Amongst diggers, they say that 1973 was the funkiest year for music,” says Rev Shines. “Supposedly the most sampled year is 1973.” This is even backed up by data, such as a 2005 histogram of samples by source year, created by a blogger named DJ Pace. Maybe there was something funky in the water that year. In addition to Ghetto, 1973 birthed much-sampled funk and soul landmarks like James Brown’s The Payback, Al Green’s Call Me, and Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters. It was also the year an obscure high school group called the Honey Drippers released an infectious protest song called “Impeach the President,” with a mesmerizing beat that’s been sampled more than 700 times. Oh, and a highly mysterious funk group called Skull Snaps released a valuable and rare self-titled record in 1973. Its beats—particularly the song “It’s a New Day”—have been sampled on hundreds of rap recordings since 1988. Clearly, their story has some parallels with 24-Carat Black, although Skull Snaps isn’t quite as brilliant an album as Ghetto.

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almost every song on it.” Once he sped up the “Mother’s Day” sample to match the “Foodstamps” drums, he realized they worked well together. Balmoris says he didn’t realize the record had been sampled so many times before: “As a producer, you want the most rare albums. At that time, I was just trying to find stuff that no one samples.” Because Wale’s mixtape wasn’t commercially released, the samples didn’t need to be cleared, Balmoris confirms. Such mixtape-era freedoms faded during the 2010s, thanks to Spotify and the ensuing pressure for rap projects to be made available on official streaming channels. (The disconnect between eras became apparent in 2019, when Chance the Rapper finally put his 2013 mixtape Acid Rap on streaming platforms; he had to omit its best song, “Juice,” because of an uncleared sample.80) And yet the more things change, the more rappers keep returning to 24-Carat Black. It’s uncanny how one relatively obscure album can have such a remarkable afterlife. In 2013, Memphis rapper Yo Gotti became the latest to sample “Poverty’s Paradise” on his song “Cold Blood,” featuring J. Cole. Ernest Lattimore, whose singing voice is featured prominently in the funereal sample, heard it and was impressed. He even reached out to Yo Gotti. “I sent an email to him thanking him for using my voice and the group,” Lattimore says. “He responded back, ‘You’re welcome, it’s a pleasure.’ ” Warren’s daughter, Tori Gray, also has a story about “Cold Blood.” Her ex-husband was a J. Cole fan. “I was talking to him about my dad, and I started talking about ‘Poverty’s Paradise,’ ” she says. “He was like, ‘Wait a minute. Your dad 117

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wrote that?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ And he was like, ‘Dude. That’s on one of my favorite songs ever!’ And then he played this J. Cole song for me, and I cried. I cried so hard, oh my gosh. Then I had to hear it all the time after that. Cuz that was his favorite song.” It was inevitable that Kendrick Lamar would sample 24-Carat Black. Lamar’s breakout, 2012’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, was a sprawling song cycle narrating the rapper’s upbringing amongst the gang violence of Compton. It was subtitled “a short film by Kendrick Lamar,” which is the kind of cocky self-mythologizing that might have suited Ghetto if Warren had been better at marketing. The follow-up, To Pimp a Butterfly, was a freewheeling opus soaked in avant-jazz headiness and an emphasis on Black activism. You could easily draw a link between Lamar’s ability to transform inner-city struggle into landmark works of Black art and what Warren was trying to accomplish in the 1970s. Except Lamar made it commercially viable. When the rapper released DAMN. in 2017, it was hailed as his third straight masterpiece. Its most ambitious song, “FEAR,” is based around a particularly moody chunk of “Poverty’s Paradise.”*At the start, we hear Hearn wailing the titular phrase, followed by Lattimore moaning, “I don’t think I could find a way to make it on this earth.” Both voices recur throughout, undergirding Lamar’s stony confessionals.

*Lamar also sampled “Poverty’s Paradise” on his 2017 single “The Heart Part 4.”

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“FEAR” contains some of his most vulnerable verses, examining his private fears, including the economic insecurity that haunts him even as he amasses wealth and fame (“Scared to go back to Section 8 with my mama stressin’ / Thirty shows a month and I still won’t buy me no Lexus”). It’s a fascinating counterpart to Ghetto’s account of inner-city struggle: what happens when the kid from the ghetto becomes rich and famous? That song was produced by The Alchemist, who did not respond to an interview request. But Rev Shines claims to have some inside knowledge here. According to Shines, Alchemist was able to obtain the 24-Carat Black session tapes from fellow producer Jake One, who in turn obtained them from Fantasy Records, which once owned the Stax catalog. (This is unconfirmed; Jake One did not respond to several requests for comment, and Lamar’s publicist did not respond to several interview requests for this book.) Shines says, “Somebody that worked for Fantasy had come up with the plan, ‘Hey, let’s start making some of these session tapes available to some of these producers.’ They probably figured it would be a good incentive to have people pulling from their catalog. I believe they only chose four or five producers to plant those seeds with—and Jake was one of those guys. In the early 2000s, he had full access to Stax original sessions. He would constantly send me pictures of the master reels all lined up. He got all the Isaac Hayes stuff, you name it.” DAMN. went triple platinum, topped year-end lists, and won the Pulitzer Prize, an unheard-of honor for a rap album. It transmitted 24-Carat Black into the bedrooms of millions 119

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of young hip-hop fans, even if they didn’t know it. And it sparked yet another shadow renaissance for 24-Carat Black. The following year, the group was sampled on major releases by Cypress Hill, Metro Boomin, and Pusha T. Let’s talk about the Pusha T track, “Infrared” (yes, the song that sparked a feud with Drake). It’s an interesting one for numerous reasons. 1) It was produced by Kanye West during a madcap few months in which West holed up in Wyoming and produced five albums—including his own album Ye—in dizzying succession, pumping out one a week. (Pusha T’s Daytona was the first to emerge.) 2) It takes its name from an intoxicating, sped-up loop of Tyrone Steels coldly muttering the words “Infrared, yeah . . . know what I mean?” West isolates the eerie intensity of this snippet, recasting it as a ghostly counterpoint to Pusha’s breathless Drake-baiting. 3) That sample is from “I Want to Make Up.” (West also chops up the song’s bass line and some miscellaneous moaning from Everson-Price.) 4) This was one of the first rap samples to cull from Gone: The Promises of Yesterday instead of Ghetto. West has long had a remarkable ear for soul snippets known and unknown. During his 2018 spree, he took a particular interest in recordings unearthed by Numero Group and Now-Again, a similarly minded boutique label. Both labels “spent the better part of the 2000s on the cutting edge of reissuing unappreciated funk and soul,” reported Rolling Stone. “Now their extensive catalogs are being mined by West.”81 The breakneck pace of West’s output that summer sowed chaos in the sample clearance process. Numero Group and 120

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Now-Again were being contacted about samples used by West mere weeks before release. Pusha’s team legally cleared the “Infrared” sample with Numero Group just days before Daytona came out. “Kanye himself likely knows nothing of the negotiation that happened to make such a clearance happen,” Sevier says, though the rapper has been hit with sample-related lawsuits in the past (notably for incorporating the Ponderosa Twins Plus One’s 1971 track “Bound” into “Bound 2”). Of course, West, with his lawyers and immense wealth, has the luxury of treating sample clearances like an afterthought. (Representatives for West and Pusha T declined or ignored interview requests for this book.) The surviving members of 24-Carat Black learned after the fact that Pusha T had sampled their music. Steels found out by chance while scouring WhoSampled.com. EversonPrice—whose voice is also featured—was unaware. Here is her reaction when I inform her, in mid-2019, that her voice was sampled on a song produced by Kanye West: “Shut up! Shut. Up. Get out of dodge. I had no idea!” The year 2018 was also the one in which Ghetto was reissued on vinyl by Craft Recordings (which is owned by Concord Music) and finally hit Spotify. Original pressings had long been sought after by collectors, who sometimes pay eye-popping prices. “I sold a near-mint copy in 2004 for $180,” says Dan Berkman, the record store owner. On Discogs.com, you can find listings as high as $286. The reason is scarcity. “I’ve been buying records my whole life basically,” says Supreme La Rock. “I dig. I go hard. And I haven’t seen that many copies.” During the 1990s, he would buy Ghetto every time he spotted it, and then trade extra 121

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copies with his friends. “It’s just one of those records where, all of a sudden, everybody wanted it.” Now you know the how of 24-Carat Black’s rebirth. But why? What is it about this one album that lends itself so well to sampling? Surely it’s not just a convenient repository of grooves, like an AOL starter CD-ROM for enterprising beatmakers. I posed this question to everyone—rappers, producers, members of 24-Carat Black. The answers were illuminating. Robert Manchurian says: “Cuz it’s the truth. It’s about life. Pain and suffering.” Jerome Derrickson says: “The same reason they like sampling James Brown. Good grooves. Real good phrases that can be used over and over and over again.” Supreme La Rock says: “It’s just so funky. Certain records— like 24-Carat Black and ‘Impeach the President’—they just have a sound to them. The sound is hop-hop. When you hear it, it hits your soul and it’s funky.” Andy Cooper, a member of the rap group Ugly Duckling, says: “It’s groovy and funky. Every chord and melody has emotion and meaning, but it’s not overly somber. These characteristics go well with certain hip-hop artists who want a scoop of that revolutionary flavor and a side of head-nod.” And my favorite answer, from C. Niambi Steele: “Well, there’s some good shit in there! If it’s good, who ain’t gonna use it if they get the chance?”

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5 Poverty’s Paradise One year after the release of Pusha T’s “Infrared,” I travel to Michigan and play the track for Tyrone Steels. He and his wife live seventeen miles outside of Detroit, in a groundfloor apartment outfitted with Old Testament iconography and a large tank of tropical fish. We sit in a small dining room, and I am momentarily hypnotized by his computer background, a rotating series of biblical scenes, such as Black Moses clutching a staff. (Steels is a devout member of the Black Hebrew Israelites.) I play “Infrared” from my iPhone, and Steels is transfixed by the sound of his voice manipulated by Kanye West. (Who wouldn’t be?) Though aware of the sample, he had not previously heard the full song. He smiles a strange smile and chuckles as it washes over him. Steels provided the spokenword part on “I Want to Make Up”; that’s his voice saying “Infrared—yeah . . .” over and over behind Pusha’s chest-beating rhymes, like a badly battered wind-up toy. As the track sputters to a close, the loop stops, and sixtyeight-year-old Steels hears a grainy sample of his twentythree-year-old voice wailing, “I’m gone! I’m gone!” He laughs. 123

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“It’s great,” he says. “I just wish I was being compensated!” Did he receive anything for the sample? At this, Steels’ wife, Theresa, walks over to a drawer and pulls out a check for sixty dollars and forty-eight cents. It was issued by Numero Group, the label that licensed the sample to Pusha, in early 2019. This is, to date, the entirety of the money that Steels says he’s ever been paid for samples of 24-Carat Black’s music: barely enough to buy a pair of sneakers. It’s particularly astonishing when you consider the caliber of artists who have rhymed over grooves he helped construct—Kendrick Lamar, Eric B. & Rakim, Jay-Z . . . “Yeah, I heard all of that,” Steels tells me. “I heard the Jay-Z stuff. I haven’t gotten anything. Nothing.” Steels could use the money. He has been on disability for more than ten years, after working as a rehab assistant in the 1980s and 1990s. He was hospitalized for a hematoma in 2012, and has not been able to walk since. In 2018, he suffered a mild stroke. He is in a wheelchair when I visit, but in good spirits, with tufts of grey hair where there once was a puffy afro. In 1977, he lost his arm while touring with Shotgun. The band had played a late show in New Orleans and needed to get back to Michigan in time for Father’s Day. They hit the road around 3:00 a.m. Lattimore was driving, but he got tired. Steels offered to take over. “I got in the driver’s seat,” he recalls. “Was driving for a while. Couple hours. When I woke up, I was off the roadway, down in the ravine.” The van collapsed. His arm was pinned. The rest is fuzzy: lots of blood, a good-Samaritan truck driver, a tourniquet. “They helicoptered me to the nearest hospital,” Steels says, “and I lost my arm in surgery.” 124

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After two months in a Mississippi hospital, then rehab, he rejoined Shotgun. He could no longer play drums, but he could provide percussion and singing. Steels had often sung during 24-Carat Black’s shows, too, but not on record. “I Want to Make Up” was the exception. He remembers recording that song, with Warren coaching Everson-Price’s vocal performance and then telling Steels to react: “Like what a pimp would say to a lady that he was finished with—that’s what he threw in my head.” It’s a phenomenal performance. Now if only he could get paid. Steels’ situation is not unique. I was startled when Princess Hearn first told me, in mid-2018, that she had never received any compensation for any of the countless samples of 24-Carat Black’s music, despite the fact that her voice had appeared, for instance, on an enormously successful Kendrick Lamar album that sold a million copies and won the Pulitzer Prize. So let me cut to the chase: Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth is one of the most endlessly sampled soul opuses of the 1970s. And none of the surviving members of 24-Carat Black I’ve interviewed have been able to receive a cent from its cultural endurance. “Not a penny, for none of those samples,” says Lattimore, chuckling sadly. “I don’t feel too good about it, to be truth with you.” In simplest terms, this is because the musicians don’t own the rights to their own music. The irony is galling and obscene. Ghetto has become a lost masterpiece examining inner-city hardship, whose creators still feel the eternal sting 125

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of exploitation. Here is a band whose body of work excoriates the state of Black poverty and neglect, and whose subsequent fate merely helps to illustrate it. Unable to reap financial reward from sample clearances over which they have no claim, these musicians are worn down by the same capitalistic cruelty they were singing about forty-five years ago. Of course, they got a raw deal then, too: the musicians never received royalties for Ghetto when it was released. Al Bell can’t say why. “It could have been, at that point in time, we didn’t have the cash to pay them,” he says. “At that time, I was too busy fighting for my life and for the overall company.” He also suspects that the members of 24-Carat Black were signed to Warren’s production company, and his production company was signed to Stax—“which would mean that we would pay his production company.” In other words, Warren controlled the flow of cash from the label. Such dry contractual matters didn’t concern the band while recording Ghetto; they were young and naïve and overjoyed to be recording for Stax at all. “We were never told we were gonna get royalties from the album,” says Derrickson. “We never signed any documents to that effect. Again, we were kids, and we weren’t looking for that. We were just excited to be recording.” Derrickson doesn’t harbor much bitterness. “It was a very good learning experience for us as young Black kids in the ghetto,” he says. “If Dale hadn’t come along when he came along, there’s no telling where we would be or what we would be doing during that time in our lives. We were chasing the musical dream. Because of Dale Warren, we were able to get a taste of that musical dream.” 126

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Not surprisingly, others take a less forgiving view of matters. “We got robbed,” says Lattimore. “We were supposed to get paid from Dale for those sessions, and that didn’t work out. He wanted all the money. He was no good.” “We got screwed and tattooed and taken advantage of,” says Campbell. “Ain’t no two ways about it! Billy Talbert and them—they were union musicians. They should have been paid! Everybody should have been paid.” Campbell claims that, after the group imploded, “Al Bell told me, ‘Clarence, I owe you one.’ And I still haven’t got paid from Al Bell.” Bell says he has no recollection of this conversation. Of course, nobody imagined then that rap stars of the distant future would be sampling 24-Carat Black well into the 2010s. Imagine explaining that to a musician in 1973. It’s the stuff of science fiction. Sampling barely existed then, and hip-hop not at all. Some of the musicians only became aware of the sampling phenomenon fairly recently. Hearn first looked into it in 2017 or 2018, when her son Duncan, a hip-hop fan, showed her Kendrick Lamar’s song. Hearn did some research and discovered the previous samples. Everson-Price was also in the dark until 2018. Steels has known for ten, maybe fifteen years. The revelation came when he looked up a 24-Carat Black song on YouTube. “I went over to the comments,” he recalls, “and someone said, ‘So-and-so sampled this album.’ I was like, What? Somebody done sample?” He began researching and discovered that his other group, Shotgun, had also been sampled (albeit not nearly as much). He and a former Shotgun bandmate began talking to an 127

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entertainment lawyer. But the lawyer couldn’t guarantee anything, and required a steep retainer just to investigate it, which they couldn’t afford. “Nothing ever came up without me just putting up $5,000 and giving it to a lawyer,” Steels says. Steels is intrigued by his music’s remarkable endurance. But some bitterness is warranted. “You can go all the way back to the ’20s and ’30s,” he says. “Look at all them great musicians—they didn’t get a dime. And they legends, man. They didn’t get anything! It’s all because of what’s written on them papers—the way they did their deals. I can go down the line, man. All the groups I met when I was in Shotgun—Con Funk Shun, Ohio Players, all them funk groups that we toured with. They all got the same story. The contract! Cheated us out of money.” What does it mean when your music is revived from the dead, but recognition and compensation do not accompany its resurrection? How does it feel to see your once-forgotten art reemerge in the form of disembodied snippets? For Niambi, it’s personal. Although she didn’t sing on Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth (she spent years performing it live), the record’s themes remain grimly relevant to her life. She was a single mother when she joined 24-Carat Black. “I was in poverty when they found me,” she says. “I had just gotten my projects apartment. You know how long you have to be on a waiting list to get an apartment in the projects? It’s insane.” She gave up the apartment, chased the dream. She fantasized of returning to her young children with money and success. “I’m still in poverty,” she tells me the first time we speak, nearly a half century later. “I’m seventy years old.” 128

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It’s July 2018. I have unknowingly contacted Niambi in a moment of despair. I tell her about the Kanye West sample. “I just buried my mom,” she responds. “I’m sitting in the middle of her house. I can’t find her will. I don’t have any money to help anybody with anything. If Kanye West wanted to go and say, ‘All the members of 24-Carat Black, y’all been in poverty all your life, I’ll give y’all a million dollars,’ he could do that. Look us up! Look us up and throw some money in our hands, cuz we’re burying our parents. “I wish I had the kind of money that would come from residuals, royalties, whatever, to save my mother’s house,” she adds. “But I don’t have a penny. And I spent my last money taking care of her. And now I can’t even save the house that I was brought up in.” Niambi’s life story is worthy of a documentary. After 24-Carat Black, she married her ex-bandmate, Victor “Nommo” McCadd, and moved to New York in the early 1980s, raising her kids in East Harlem at the dawn of the hip-hop era. She worked at the Apollo Theater and recorded two albums and toured with the late jazz organist Jack McDuff. She became a nurse for twenty-five years, though her work as a singer and actress remained her passion. Her resume is littered with theatrical credits, and her then-band, Fierce Jones, played CBGB in its heyday. Yet, she says, “I never reached the pinnacle I was supposed to.” In the mid-1980s, Niambi left New York, moved to Michigan, and eventually lost everything in a fire. She returned to New York after September 11 when she was hired as a nurse to a wealthy man. When work dried up, housing insecurity became a problem. “I was living in an apartment, 129

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but it was a stressful situation because they were trying to get me out and I wouldn’t leave, cuz I didn’t have anywhere to go,” Niambi says. “I had a home, but I was just under siege.” In 2006, she was hit by a car and became homeless for a year. Today she lives in a Section 8 building in Harlem, which she calls a godsend. Her husband and mother both died in 2018, mere months apart. When we meet for brunch nearby in 2019, she tells me her only income is an $885-a-month social security check. She has six great-grandkids and can’t buy them a present. “Kanye’s having church, and I can’t pay my rent,” Niambi says. “What does that mean?” When Gone: The Promises of Yesterday was released in 2009, she got nothing.* The subject of rappers sampling 24-Carat Black makes her apoplectic. “My reaction was, how could I beat one of them over the head? What the fuck am I supposed to do?” She wants to work again. She wants to get gigs. No one’s calling. “He’s having church, but he ain’t inviting me to be in the choir,” Niambi says, referring to West’s Sunday Service Choir. “I’ll come out there and sing! I’m still fucking alive!” If the surviving members of 24-Carat Black aren’t receiving checks for Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth sample clearances, *Rob Sevier says the label wasn’t aware of Niambi’s involvement then, and that it was Bruce Thompson’s job to disperse money to the other members. Evidently Thompson couldn’t find Niambi or even recall her name, which is why she’s credited in the album notes as “Naombi Still.” (Thompson died in 2015.)

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who the hell is? I went down a surreal rabbit hole trying to find out. First, it helps to understand how sample licensing works. A recording contains two distinct copyrights: the composition (the song itself) and the specific sound recording.82 Thus, a typical sample clearance negotiation must occur on both levels: with the writer of the song (i.e., the publishing level) and with the owner of the master recording (i.e., the recording level). The rights-holder might receive an advance for the clearance (this figure varies widely, although between $2,000 and $10,000 is typical) and eventually royalties, if and when the song generates revenue. Back in the 1990s, this byzantine process was so confusing for rappers to navigate that they began hiring savvy specialists like Pat Shannahan, the sample clearance expert I quoted in Chapter Three, to negotiate and clear samples. This is like the hip-hop equivalent of hiring someone to do your taxes for you, if doing taxes involved tracking down the copyright owners of obscure bossa nova tunes. For thirty years, Shannahan has been clearing esoteric samples for acts like Prince Paul (her first client), the Beastie Boys (since Ill Communication), Beck, and the Avalanches. When sample lawsuits first began, “this sort of knowledge didn’t really exist,” Shannahan says. “I had a strong background in music publishing and records. So I understood all of this in detail.” Shannahan is sometimes known as the “Sample Detective,” a nickname affectionately bequeathed by longtime clients the Avalanches, whose affinity for bizarro sample sources can make the rights-clearing process a wild goose hunt. Still, she relishes the challenge—and appreciates the art form it serves. 131

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“The true art of sampling, as I always understood it, was to choose very obscure recordings,” Shannahan says. “[The Avalanches] went around to bargain basement places where they were selling cutouts. So finding out who was the current owner of a lot of these things, which were never hits—it’s very challenging.”* Once the rights-holder is located, they either deny the clearance request—which is rare—or provide a quote of what the sample will cost. “I do the best I can to negotiate a better deal for my client,” Shannahan says. In the case of 24-Carat Black, the recording copyright for Ghetto was once owned by Stax, whose post-1968 catalog was acquired by Fantasy Records in 1977, which was subsequently acquired by Concord Records in 2004.83 In other words: Concord now stands to profit from the eternal recycling of Ghetto’s grooves. “We do own the album in question and grant sample licenses charging proper licensing fees,” confirms Concord’s vice president of licensing by email. When I ask how much money Concord earns each year from samples of 24-Carat Black’s music, the company clams up.

*Sample-clearing is a weirder hustle than you think. One client of Shannahan’s wanted to use a sample from an East Indian recording. Shannahan had a nightmare of a time trying to figure out who owned the recording rights. “I ended up having to stay at my office all night because I had somehow acquired a phone number for a record store in India,” she says, “and I had to call the guy in the middle of my night, because he would know [who owned the rights]. And I finally got him on the phone. He didn’t speak English. I didn’t speak his language.” The mystery remained unsolved, “but that’s the lengths I go to.”

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My email is passed along to a VP of corporate communication, who simply writes: “We do not disclose this type of information.” The publishing rights are thornier. Since Warren wrote virtually all of 24-Carat Black’s music (or at least received the writing credits, where Ghetto is concerned*), the publishing royalties belong to his estate. And since Warren died in 1994, his estate is likely administrated by his widow, a woman named Marilyn Jones, whom Warren married two months before his death. “Unfortunately, the law in Georgia states that she’s the sole owner,” says Vicki Gray. Jones is a mystery. I’ve been unable to reach her. Apparently, she’s a deputy sheriff in Georgia. “She’s not reaching out to nobody,” says Hearn. In 2012, Hearn received an email from Dale O. Warren Jr.—Warren’s son from a prior relationship— saying that he discovered discrepancies on Warren’s death certificates and that he believed Jones “wanted to hide quite a bit of stuff.” Warren Jr.’s email states that his father was worth millions in estate and assets when he died, but “no one seems to know what happened to any of it.” In an odd twist, Jones decided to include Tori Gray in Warren’s estate about a decade after his death, because—in Vicki’s words—“that was the only child that she knew.” Hearn

*Gone is a different story. Manchurian says he wrote “most of the lyrics” for that material. He is co-credited on several songs, including “I Want to Make Up,” which means he received a cut of the sample clearance. (In 2018, he told me he was waiting on his royalty check, but he wouldn’t say how much he was receiving.) “I didn’t know who Pusha T was,” Manchurian says. “My grandson told me who he was. It’s an honor, man.”

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then contacted BMI and was able to add her adult sons, David and Duncan Warren, to the estate as Warren’s heirs going forward, but they couldn’t collect years’ worth of unclaimed funds. Tori says that she now receives regular royalty statements from her father’s estate, but she never sees money from rappers sampling 24-Carat Black on there. She’s not sure why. “I’ve actually been wanting to get to the bottom of that,” Tori tells me. “I just don’t know who to talk to.” Hearn has raised her inability to profit from samples of her own voice with the Artists Rights Enforcement Corporation, but without much luck. “Since we don’t have any rights to the material, that puts us in a bind,” she says. When I sit with her and Campbell in that living room in Michigan, she muses, sadly, “If we had a contract or a deal or something . . .” Campbell, her older brother, angrily interjects: “The record company still had the contract! Princess, don’t feel sorry for the record company, cuz they don’t give a fuck about me or you. Okay?” Campbell is endlessly aggrieved about the situation. He doesn’t need the money for himself, he tells me. He’s doing fine. What he wants is for his little sisters to be taken care of. They’ve been abused, misused, screwed—Campbell sometimes speaks in rhyme. He wants to get everyone from 24-Carat Black together and hire a lawyer. “Now,” he says, “what we’re trying to do is redeem what the devils took.” The particulars of 24-Carat Black’s story are unusual, extraordinary even, but exist within a deeper historic pattern of predominantly Black funk and soul musicians being cheated 134

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out of money or recognition. The history of this tradition is sordid and long. Sly Stone, who profoundly shaped the development of funk music, wound up homeless, living in a van and showering at a neighbor’s house while his ex-manager and a production company reaped his royalty payments.84 Isaac Hayes was forced into bankruptcy and lost his home when his records stopped selling. Often, rotten or predatory contracts are to blame. “In those days, when we signed a contract, we didn’t read the bottom line,” says Manchurian. “It’s more common than you know,” says Niambi. “The taking advantage of artists who are pure and give all they got, only to be rewarded with a pittance. Maybe a ride in a limousine. And then, when you go home, you still have to figure out how to feed your family.” Niambi once had a romance with Eddie Hazel, the blazing ParliamentFunkadelic guitarist. “He was poor, too,” she claims. “Because George Clinton took advantage of all those guys.” In his 2016 book Kill ’Em and Leave, James McBride sums up the history of American music history like this: [A] trumpet player blows a solo in a Philly nightclub in 1945. Somebody slaps it on a record, and fifty years later that same solo is a final in a college jazz department, and your kid pays $60,000 a year to take the final while the guy who blew the solo out of his guts in the first place is deader than yesterday’s rice and beans, his family is suffering from the same social illness that created his great solo, and nobody gave two hoots about the guy when he died . . .85 That book is about the life and death of James Brown, whose most legendary drummer, Clyde Stubblefield, was known for 135

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having performed the meticulously syncopated breakbeat in Brown’s song “Funky Drummer,” an iconic drum solo which has been sampled more than a thousand times. The beat’s mesmerizing swagger is embedded deep in the history of hip-hop. Yet Stubblefield was unable to profit from his landmark recording, because he did not have a songwriter credit and thus no publisher rights to the song. “All my life I’ve been wondering about my money,” Stubblefield told the New York Times in 2011.86 He was suffering from end-stage renal disease and had no health insurance besides Medicare. Six years later, he died of kidney failure. The case illustrates the antiquated and exploitative nature of copyright law as it collides with notions of music authorship. Stubblefield performed—indeed, created—the portion of the song that gets sampled: the beat. “That was mine,” he said in 2011. “[Brown] didn’t tell me what to play.”87 Yet Brown wrote the surrounding melody and lyrics, and so Brown received the full copyright. “A drumbeat is never part of a songwriting credit,” says Shannahan. “A song is music and lyrics.” This exact plight has prevented countless funk-era session musicians from profiting from samples of their own playing. It’s the reason Tyrone Steels doesn’t get a cent when you chop up his playing on “Foodstamps.” The solution isn’t to criminalize or further inhibit the work of sampling, which is rightfully regarded as an art form and a hip-hop building block; litigious restrictions would not do anyone much good, except lawyers. Besides, some of the rappers who’ve culled from 24-Carat Black are themselves struggling to earn a living wage in an industry structured to 136

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generate profit for those at the top, which today may be Spotify executives and shareholders rather than artists. Yet it does seem emblematic of some deep rot within the industry that so much talent is rewarded with poverty. What’s the solution? GoFundMe? Don’t laugh. Consider the strange saga of the “Amen break,” another famous and funky breakbeat, lifted from the once-obscure 1969 cut “Amen, Brother” by the Winstons. By the early 1990s, this four-bar segment of spitfire drumming had become a legendary touchstone of drum & bass music. It has been sampled in more than 2,000 songs. Yet the song’s writer, Richard Spencer (not the neo-Nazi), had received virtually no money because so few of those samples had been licensed. According to NPR, he didn’t even know about its use until 1996—at which point he discovered his options were null because the song preceded 1972 and thus wasn’t covered by federal copyright law.88 Finally, in 2015, two British DJs launched a GoFundMe campaign to pay Spencer for his contribution to music. “If you have ever written or sold any music with the amen break,” they wrote, “please donate.”89 Remarkably, it worked. The campaign raised $26,000 for Spencer, who posed, looking happy and a little bewildered, with a giant check. One problem. Gregory Coleman, the drummer who actually played the “Amen break,” had died poor in 2006. When I track down his daughter, Glynis Coleman-Jones, she confirms that her father never received royalties. “It’s the most sampled drum break in the world,” she says. “And it was something that he did.” Coleman-Jones plans to get a tattoo with the famous waveform of those drums. 137

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She denies media reports that her father died homeless: “He may not have had a lot of money, but I don’t think he was flat broke.” Still, the lack of money and recognition stings. “I can hear that loop on commercials, everything,” she says. “It’s a lot of money that I know I’m entitled to. I don’t have the money to pay a lawyer to get it.” In this context, Ghetto begins to seem like a prophetic metacommentary on its own exploitation. And, given the name Warren chose for his project, it’s also a bleak statement on how race and class remain inextricably intertwined in America. Forty-seven years later, Black cultural treasure continues to enrich predominantly white corporate interests. I’m reminded of an old EP title by the avant-funk band ESG: Sample Credits Don’t Pay Our Bills. “We didn’t sample nobody to make our music,” Niambi says. “We’re original, pure, uncorrupted. But still broke as hell. And now supposedly somebody wrote an article where 24-Carat Black is supposed to be in the artists of legend? Well, being legendary don’t feed you or pay bills.” The saga of 24-Carat Black does not have a crowdfunding redemption arc—not yet—but it does have an unexpected twist. In 2018, shortly after I began reporting a story about the band’s situation for Pitchfork, Numero Group began hastily collecting paperwork to get some of the surviving members paid a share of the Pusha T clearance. The label said it had been intending to pay them all along, but hadn’t had a chance to get in touch with all the musicians and collect their payment information. (The imminent publication of a Pitchfork article clearly sped up this process.) 138

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Several weeks later, Hearn, Everson-Price, and Niambi received checks for $500. That’s not much of a fortune, but it is more money than they had received from their music’s cultural endurance during the preceding four decades combined. Steels, oddly, received only $60.48. He’s not sure why his check was so much skimpier. (Numero Group has not responded to my requests for comment.) They remain unable to profit at all from Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth. Meanwhile, new samples keep materializing. Hearn regards the phenomenon with fascination and a glimmer of pride—indeed, as proof of her work’s vitality. “Being the original artist, and hearing my voice still being played and sampled—it’s awesome,” she says. Others find it pernicious, even a kind of bastardization. “Mr. Warren told us our great-grandchildren will be living on this music,” Niambi says. “Well, I have great-grandchildren. The music has still not been heard. Only samples. Those samples don’t mean nothing.” She compares 24-Carat Black to a dinosaur: displaced, forgotten, fossilized by time. “The dead dinosaur made the fuel that runs the world,” she says. “The dinosaur wasn’t paying attention. He was too busy trying to live. He didn’t know he was going to be fuel. And neither did I.”

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Epilogue

I forgot to tell you one of 24-Carat Black’s best stories. It involves Elvis. Yes, that Elvis. The King. It was 1973. The band was rolling through Stax’s Memphis studios during that whirlwind first tour. Elvis Presley was there, too, recording in Studio A. This must have been July ’73, when an erratic Presley, reeling from a recent divorce, spent four days recording at Stax studios.90 Tyrone Steels lights up at the memory of their meeting. “Aw man, it was awesome,” he says. “Dale came in and said, ‘Y’all wanna meet Elvis?’ We said, ‘Get out of here!’ He said, ‘Come on, man. He’s in the studio!’ We went in there—aw man, there he was, standing at the mic. And Dale said, ‘Elvis! 24-Carat Black!’ ” Steels dips into an Elvis impression, impersonating The King’s enthused response: “Aw yeah, how y’all doing, man! Dale told me ’bout you guys!” The young musicians were awed. Presley shook everyone’s hand. When someone asked about his car outside, he even handed over the keys and let Manchurian take it for a ride. “It was a life experience, man,” says Lattimore. I think about this moment often: a fleeting encounter between The King and 24-Carat Black. The fading rock ’n’ roll 141

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star, an icon of the past; the visionary funk band, whose music would be unearthed by genres of the distant future. Past and future, colliding in Memphis. A brief exchange of energies, and they were on their way. Presley had probably forgotten the encounter by the next day. 24-Carat Black would remember for the rest of their lives. I don’t know. Maybe I’m reading too much into this. I wasn’t there. But if people of the future had not stumbled upon 24-Carat Black and projected their own meanings onto this music—hearing its desperation, extracting musical fragments, absorbing them into their own wild creations— this book would never exist.

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Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I am deeply indebted to the surviving members and close associates of 24-Carat Black who opened up and entrusted me to tell their stories: Clarence Campbell, Jerome Derrickson, P. Ann Everson-Price, Princess Hearn, Ernest Lattimore, Robert Manchurian, C. Niambi Steele, Tyrone Steels, Hedda Sudduth, Shakir Suleiman (a.k.a. Jaonne Xavier Thompson), and Kathleen Talbert. Thank you for your time, wisdom, and generosity. In particular, Princess Hearn was the first person I ever reached out to about 24-Carat Black and was an enthusiastic guide and friend as I researched the group’s story. Clarence Campbell, Princess’s brother, welcomed me into his home in Ann Arbor and gave me a driving tour of 24-Carat Black history. Tyrone Steels welcomed me into his own home, spent hours sharing his memories, then spent months answering my follow-up questions over text; his wife, Theresa, was even kind enough to drive me to the airport. C. Niambi Steele met with me on numerous occasions and offered crucial and unsparing perspective on the exploitation at the center of this story. (These four individuals are the only sources I interviewed in person; all other interviews were conducted by phone or Skype.) 143

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I’m immensely grateful to 33 1/3 and Bloomsbury, and my editor, Leah Babb-Rosenfeld, for taking a chance on an unusual book idea and giving me the time to report it thoroughly. Thanks also to boice-Terrel Allen, who enthusiastically edited the first draft of this book. This project first began as a Pitchfork article in the summer of 2018. “It’s a bit of a rabbit hole,” I wrote in my initial pitch—I had no idea. Jill Mapes, my editor there, believed in the story from the beginning and expertly edited it every step of the way. I’m extremely grateful for her support, and for the entire staff at Pitchfork, who championed that piece and made me realize that it could become something larger. Jeff Kollath, executive director of the Stax Museum, was generous with his time and knowledge, as was the legendary Al Bell. I’m also grateful to Tori Gray and Vicki Gray, who opened up about their memories of Dale Warren and revisited some painful subjects. I’m grateful to all the rappers and producers who spoke to me about their relationships with this record. In particular, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Ishmael Butler, who was generous and insightful and told me the story that became the introduction to this book. I first contacted Ishmael in July 2018; he called me twenty minutes later, immediately knew which sample I was asking about, and gave me incredibly vivid details on the spot. I’m grateful to MoPOP Pop Conference, where I presented a portion of this research in April 2019. Additionally, thanks to Brian Socolow for his legal expertise. The dearth of previous in-depth reporting on 24-Carat Black was part of what made this project both challenging 144

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and exciting. I did, however, rely heavily on writings by both Rob Bowman and Rob Sevier, whose liner notes—for Ghetto and Gone, respectively—provided crucial overviews of the band’s career trajectory. I also relied on WhoSampled.com’s database of sample knowledge. (Every sample mentioned in this book was verified with my own ears.) For enthusiastic encouragement during this project, thank you to: Matt Adelman, Amandla Baraka, my uncle Charlie Berger, my grandmother Fran Berger, Amy Block, Ryan Bort, Dash, Cady Drell, Scottie Farmer, Piers Gelly, Zach Goldberg, Matt Klimerman, Adam Lauria, Sam Maldonado, Paula Mejia, Anna Menta, Peter Myers, Alex Ray, Sam Sklar, Anthony Smith, Benjamin Soloway, the entire Vaadia family (including the late Boaz Vaadia, who is deeply missed), Lauren Walker, Lucy Westcott, Danny Witkin, and Barbara Zitwer. Thanks also to my late aunt Victoria Schonfeld, who passed away during the writing of this book; all my ex-Newsweek friends and editors; my Wesleyan friends and professors; The Dopenhagen; “Pringles & Beer”; my entire extended family and cousins—I regret that I can’t possibly name everyone. For immeasurable support, love, and never once asking why I chose to spend a year writing a book about a strange album they hadn’t heard of, I am deeply grateful to my parents, Elisabeth and Gary Schonfeld; my brothers, Matthew and Sam Schonfeld; and my girlfriend, Rebecca Vaadia, who encouraged me always. Thank you for everything. Zach Schonfeld January 2020 145

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Notes

1. Frere-Jones, Sasha. “Organized Confusion.” The New Yorker, August 29, 2011, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/08/29/ organized-confusion. 2. McLeod, Kembrew, and Peter DiCola. Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling. Duke University Press, 2011, p. 1. 3. Kembrew and DiCola, p. 22. 4. Bowman, Rob. Liner notes to Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth. 24-Carat Black, Stax Records/Fantasy, Inc. CD. 1994. 5. Sevier, Rob. Liner notes to Gone: The Promises of Yesterday, 24-Carat Black. Numero Group. CD. 2009. 6. “On The Way.” The Cincinnati Enquirer, November 19, 1966, p. 4. Newspapers.com, www.newspapers.com/image/100660572. 7. Bowman, Rob. Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records. Schirmer Trade Books, 1997, p. 206. 8. Power, Fremont. “Detroit To Hollywood To Indy.” The Indianapolis News, October 20, 1975, p. 21. Newspapers.com, www.newspapers.com/image/312339353/?terms=%2224carat%2Bblack%22. 9. Sevier. Liner notes, p. 7.

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10. “Hitsville: 1960–1961.” Berry, Me, and Motown: The Untold Story, by Raynoma Gordy Singleton et al., Contemporary Books, 1990. 11. Dreams to Remember: Otis Redding, Stax Records, and the Transformation of Southern Soul, by Mark Ribowsky, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2015, p. 132. 12. Bowman, p. 49. 13. Ribowsky, pp. 288–9. 14. Sevier. Liner notes, p. 10. 15. Bowman, p. 184. 16. “Warren Inks Prod Pact with Stax.” Cash Box, April 10, 1971, p. 28. American Radio History, www.americanradiohistory. com/Archive-Cash-Box/70s/1971/Cash-Box-1971-04-10.pdf. 17. Sevier. Liner notes, p. 10. 18. Sevier. Liner notes, p. 10. 19. Bowman. Liner notes. 20. Powers, Ann, and Valerie J Nelson. “ ‘Black Moses’ Led Pop to New Ground.” The Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2008, www. latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-aug-11-me-hayes11-story. html. 21. Liner notes to Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth. 24-Carat Black, Enterprise/Stax Records. LP. 1973. 22. “PEOPLE’S STUDIO.” Ann Arbor Sun, April 30, 1971, aadl.org/ node/193118. 23. Sevier. Liner notes p. 11. 24. Bowman. Liner notes. 25. Sevier. Liner notes, p. 11. 26. “. . . To Be Continued—Isaac Hayes: Credits.” AllMusic,

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RhythmOne, www.allmusic.com/album/to-becontinued-mw0000653383/credits. 27. Lauderdale, Vance. “Flute Picker.” Memphis Magazine, December 1, 2008, memphismagazine.com/ask-vance/ flute-picker. 28. Shipley, Ken. Liner notes to Gone: The Promises of Yesterday, 24-Carat Black. Numero Group. CD. 2009, p. 3. 29. Sevier. Liner notes, p. 11. 30. Bowman, p. 299. 31. Bowman. Liner notes. 32. “SCLC Dinner to Be Held.” The Phoenix, October 31, 1973. Marian University, mushare.marian.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a rticle=1352&context=phnx. 33. Sevier. Liner notes, pp. 11–12. 34. Bowman, p. 296. 35. McLayea, Eunice. “Party People.” Indianapolis Recorder, December 14, 1974, p. 11. Hoosier State Chronicles, newspapers. library.in.gov/?a=d&d=INR19741214-01.1.11&srpos=1&e=------en-20--1--txt-txIN-%2224+carat+black%22------. 36. Bowman, p. 333. 37. Sevier. Liner notes, p. 13. 38. “24-Carat Show for Students.” The Herald-Palladium, February 6, 1975, p. 13. Newspapers.com, www.newspapers.com/ image/362784095/?terms=%2224-carat%2Bblack%22. 39. Bush, John. “Zapp: Biography & History.” AllMusic, RhythmOne, www.allmusic.com/artist/zapp-mn0000596451/ biography. 40. Power, 1975.

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41. “Busted: 1963–1967.” Berry, Me, and Motown: The Untold Story, by Raynoma Gordy Singleton et al., Contemporary Books, 1990. 42. Sluiter, Matthijs. “Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth by The 24-Carat Black.” Fonts in Use, April 12, 2019, fontsinuse.com/uses/25882/ ghetto-misfortune-s-wealth-by-the-24-carat-bl. 43. Kaufman, Michael T. “Welfare Check Day—‘It’s Incredible.’ ” The New York Times, August 17, 1972, p. 37, www.nytimes. com/1972/08/17/archives/welfare-check-day-its-incredible. html. 44. Streeter, Ruth C., director. The Vanishing Family – Crisis in Black America. YouTube, CBS News, 1986, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=AxWpiMSo2a8. 45. Bowman. Liner notes. 46. MacDonald, Maurice. “Food Stamps: An Analytical History.” Social Service Review, vol. 51, no. 4, December 1977, pp. 642–58. JSTOR, doi: 10.1086/643558. 47. Tangari, Joe. “24-Carat Black: Gone: The Promises Of Yesterday.” Pitchfork, Condé Nast, January 8, 2010, pitchfork. com/reviews/albums/13779-gone-the-promises-of-yesterday. 48. MANNYBOLONE. “Can vs. 24 Carat Black.” Soul Strut, Soul Strut, March 2009, community.soulstrut.com/ discussion/52017/can-vs-24-carat-black. 49. Thompson, Ahmir. “Questlove, on Instagram: ‘Today I Got to See with My Own Eyes the #SP1200 That Was Utilized by the Late Great #PaulC. The Engineer/Producer/Beatdigger Who Inspired . . .’.” Instagram, August 3, 2016, www.instagram. com/p/BIrA2xiBz3e. 50. Sorcinelli, Gino. “Paul C. McKasty: The Legend, the Tragedy, the Story of an Era.” Medium, September 20, 2017, medium.

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com/micro-chop/paul-c-mckasty-the-legend-the-tragedy-thestory-of-an-era-aea20515d282. 51. Isenberg, Daniel. “Large Professor Tells All: The Stories Behind His Classic Records (Part 1).” Complex, Complex Media, May 23, 2012, www.complex.com/music/2012/05/large-professortells-all-the-stories-behind-his-classic-records-part-i/ eric-b-rakim-in-the-ghetto-1990. 52. Edgers, Geoff. Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song That Changed American Music Forever. Blue Rider Press, 2019, p. 219. 53. Martin, Felicity. “The 10 Best Rare Groove Tracks, According to Norman Jay.” Dummy Mag, November 7, 2019, www. dummymag.com/10-best/10-best-rare-groove-norman-jay. 54. McLeod and DiCola, p. 90. 55. McLeod and DiCola, p. 90. 56. LeRoy, Dan. Paul’s Boutique. Continuum, 2006, p. 94. 57. LeRoy, p. 37. 58. LeRoy, p. 122. 59. Moore, Marcus J. “Don’t Call Madlib, He’ll Call You.” Pitchfork, Pitchfork, June 7, 2019, pitchfork.com/levels/dont-call-madlibhell-call-you. 60. Frere-Jones, Sasha. “Organized Confusion.” The New Yorker, August 29, 2011, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/08/29/ organized-confusion. 61. Gonzales, Michael A. “Cool Like That: The Reunited Digable Planets Look Back.” Pitchfork, Condé Nast, June 16, 2016, pitchfork.com/thepitch/1190-cool-like-that-the-reuniteddigable-planets-look-back. 62. Bowman. Liner notes.

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63. Broughton, Frank. “Naughty By Nature: Poverty Rap.” Hip Hop Connection, February 1995. Rock’s Backpages, www. rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/naughty-by-naturepoverty-rap. 64. “Synopsis Two: Mother’s Day.” WhoSampled, Nadav Poraz, www.whosampled.com/The-24-Carat-Black/SynopsisTwo%3A-Mother%27s-Day. 65. McLeod and DiCola, p. 26. 66. LeRoy, p. 45. 67. McLeod and DiCola, p. 210. 68. McLeod and DiCola, p. 133. 69. Richards, Chris. “The Court Case That Changed Hip-Hop— from Public Enemy to Kanye—Forever.” The Washington Post, July 6, 2012, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-courtcase-that-changed-hip-hop--from-public-enemy-to-kanye-forever/2012/07/06/gJQAVWr0RW_story.html. 70. McLeod and DiCola, p. 28. 71. Jenkins, Craig. “Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back/Fear of a Black Planet.” Pitchfork, Condé Nast, November 25, 2014, pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19997public-enemy-it-takes-a-nation-of-millions-to-hold-usbackfear-of-a-black-planet. 72. Murphy, Tom. “DJ Shadow Isn’t so Sure That Endtroducing Was the First 100 Percent Sample-Based Record.” Westword, September 26, 2013, www.westword.com/music/red-rocks2020-concert-season-11543275. 73. Richards. 74. Semuels, Alana. “The Racist History of Portland, the Whitest City in America.” The Atlantic, Emerson Collective, August 19,

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2016, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/ racist-history-portland/492035. 75. Sevier. Liner notes. 76. “Dale Warren: Before and After.” Numero Group: By The Numbers, Numero Group, April 29, 2009, numerogroup. wordpress.com/tag/marquee-label. 77. Tangari. 2010. 78. Riedy, Jack. “B Boys Will B Boys: An Oral History of Black Star.” Passion of the Weiss, Passion of the Weiss, LLC., December 19, 2018, www.passionweiss.com/2018/12/19/bboys-will-b-boys-an-oral-history-of-black-star. 79. McLeod and DiCola, p. 176–80. 80. Glicksman, Josh. “Chance the Rapper’s Hit Song ‘Juice’ Missing From ‘Acid Rap’ on Streaming Services, Replaced by 30-Second Charity Request.” Billboard, June 28, 2019, www.billboard.com/ articles/columns/hip-hop/8518032/chance-the-rapper-juiceacid-rap-streaming-services. 81. Weingarten, Christopher R. “Kanye West’s Summer of Samples: How Two Reissue Labels Helped Make Wyoming Funky.” Rolling Stone, Penske Media Corporation, June 27, 2018, www. rollingstone.com/music/music-news/kanye-wests-summer-ofsamples-how-two-reissue-labels-helped-make-wyomingfunky-666876. 82. McLeod and DiCola, p. 2. 83. Plambeck, Joseph. “An Indie That Believes in CDs.” The New York Times, May 10, 2010, p. B1, www.nytimes. com/2010/05/10/business/media/10concord.html. 84. Post Staff Report. “Funk Legend Sly Stone Homeless and Living in a Van in LA.” The New York Post, September 25, 2011,

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nypost.com/2011/09/25/funk-legend-sly-stone-homeless-andliving-in-a-van-in-la. 85. McBride, James. Kill ’Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul. Spiegel & Grau, 2016, p. 18. 86. Sisario. New York Times. 87. McLeod and DiCola, p. 92. 88. Wygant, Erin. “Funk Band behind ‘Amen Break’ Drum Riff Receives Long Overdue Notoriety.” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, August 7, 2017. 89. Savage, Mark. “Amen Break Musician Finally Gets Paid.” BBC News, BBC, November 11, 2015, www.bbc.com/news/ entertainment-arts-34785551. 90. Hanson, Alan. “Elvis at Stax in 1973 . . . A Final Triumph Or Start of Presley’s Great Fade Away?” Elvis History Blog, July 2013, www.elvis-history-blog.com/elvis-stax.html.

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Also available in the series

1.

Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes

2.

Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans

11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard 12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo

3.

Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis

4.

The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller

14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore

5.

The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice

15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths

6.

Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh

16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy

7.

ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli

8.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry

9.

13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk

17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz 19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli

Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott

20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes

10. Prince’s Sign “ō” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos

21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 155

A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi

37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan

23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks

38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth

24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing. . . . . by Eliot Wilder

39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns

25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese

40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson

26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes

41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard

28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven

42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy

29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper

43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier

30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy

45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier

31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis

46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor

33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar

48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz

35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti

49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite

36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal

156

A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier

50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef

65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton

51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich

66. Madness’ One Step Beyond . . . by Terry Edwards

52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson

67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal

53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay

68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson

54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel

69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol

55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw

70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois

56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle

71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten

57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris 58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs

72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles 73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo

59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron

74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson

60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen

75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent

61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl

76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin

62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate

77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks

63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay

78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr

157

A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer

93.

J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson

80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost

94.

The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez

81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell

95.

Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven

82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield

96.

Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold

83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman

97.

Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves

98.

Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild

86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem

99.

Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden

87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson

100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast

84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton

88.

101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner

They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Elizabeth Sandifer

102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha

89.

Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall

103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford

90.

Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum

104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy

91.

Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J.H. Dettmar

105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley

92.

Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor

106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann

158

A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

121. Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero

107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland

122. The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker

110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr.

123. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs by Eric Eidelstein

111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod

124. Bob Mould’s Workbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Couch

112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole

125. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton

113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork

126. The Raincoats’ The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly

114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts

127. Björk’s Homogenic by Emily Mackay

115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic

128. Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin

116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas

129. Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross

117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi

130. Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony

118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia

131. Lou Reed’s Transformer by Ezra Furman

119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney

132. Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Peepshow by Samantha Bennett

120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli

133. Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel

159

A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

134. dc Talk’s Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson

144. D’Angelo’s Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick

135. Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry

145. Judy Garland’s Judy at Carnegie Hall by Manuel Betancourt

136. Odetta’s One Grain of Sand by Matthew Frye Jacobson

146. Elton John’s Blue Moves by Matthew Restall

137. Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible by David Evans

147. Various Artists’ I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen by Ray Padgett

138. The Shangri-Las’ Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin

148. Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope by Ayanna Dozier

139. Tom Petty’s Southern Accents by Michael Washburn

149. Suicide’s Suicide by Andi Coulter

140. Massive Attack’s Blue Lines by Ian Bourland

150. Elvis Presley’s From Elvis in Memphis by Eric Wolfson

141. Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach by Roshanak Kheshti

151. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads by Santi Elijah Holley

142. The Wild Tchoupitoulas’ The Wild Tchoupitoulas by Bryan Wagner

152. 24-Carat Black’s Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth by Zach Schonfeld

143. David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs by Glenn Hendler

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