It’s June 2018, and I have one last trip to Memphis to meet up with Eddie Floyd, with whom I am writing a book. (This one.) Having been to Memphis many a time over the decades, I’ve finally found a neighborhood I like in what can be a geographically disconcerting city. It’s Cooper Young, where Goner Records has boxes full of dirt cheap Stax and Hi 45s, Hammer & Nail has great craft beer and a friendly clientele, Celtic Crossing attracts Liverpool fans on match days, and Imagine Vegan Café has animal-free soul food. Johnny Cash made his public debut round the corner and, on this particular visit, a couple called Jonathan and Alison have a proper AirBnB spare room to rent out just a couple of blocks back from all this action.
That spare room contained a bed, a reading table, and an old-fashioned record cabinet with a few equally old albums scattered inside. When I met the young hosts, they informed me I would have their place to myself for a couple of days as they had to drive to Florida for a funeral, and encouraged me to play away.
Greetings everyone… As I am in the middle of moving this last weekend of June 2024, and because I attracted a lot of new subscribers with my posts about Spotify and Qobuz these last two weeks, gleaning from comments and other interactions just how many of you are truly interested in the discovery of great music, new or old, I have decided to repost this article from last August. I had planned at the time for it to be a follow-up to my debut post here on Substack, “Digital Conversion Therapy: How streaming makes middle-aged music-making fun,” which I have removed from the archive paywall so you can see them both. I promised with that debut column that I would soon post “the double AA-side to this initial A-side post, in which I [will] venerate vinyl.” This is that AA-side.
A reminder that paid subscribers get access to all the archives, to exclusive features and interviews, and to the Crossed Channels podcast. Meantime, groove on.
I can’t remember any of the other albums in that guest room collection. I suspect I only played the one. It was The Chi-Lites’ 1972 release A Lonely Man, and I am here to tell you two things (well, knowing me, probably many more, but two primarily):
The experience confirmed that there is no substitute for vinyl, especially the Long Player, which has proved itself over decades as the perfect distillation of the art form we know as popular music. All earlier praise of the streaming platforms aside, there is simply no more divine way to open oneself up to music, than to play a hitherto-undiscovered LP, on vinyl, on a record player.
The experience revealed A Lonely Man as the most beautiful soul album I had ever heard, a revelation rendered all the more redolent by the fact that I knew little more about the Chi-Lites when I set it on the turntable and lowered the needle, than that its opening song, “Oh Girl,” had been a global hit, as had an earlier song, “Have You Seen Her?” - and that I wanted to hear what a full album by them might contain. Five years later, I can still recall the feeling that followed over the next 48 minutes. Indeed, playing A Lonely Man as I sat down to write this article, I found myself tensing ecstatically in anticipation of its sophisticated arrangements, its heavenly melodies, its varied rhythms, its comfortable grooves and, but of course, its harmonized vocals stretching across the octaves. A Lonely Man concentrates my senses to a point of heightened awareness, to a frightened realization that it operates on another plane from other soul music, that it is tapped into something most of us will never be able to tap into in our art: something so pure, so present, so prescient and purposeful, and yet so physically intangible that it is hard to quantify or qualify.
Now, depending on your age and your background (geographically as well as musically), you may know more about the Chi-Lites than I did that day. You may even be surprised by my confession of ignorance, given that in 2018 I was working on my second successive book on American soul music, but I’m willing to look stupid if it makes the Chi-Lites sound better.
And please, hear my origin story… “Oh Girl” hit the British Top 40 in May 1972, less than a month after I turned 8 years old and a month before David Bowie’s legendary Top of the Pops performance of “Starman” inspired my family’s first ever collective visit to a record shop to purchase a 7” 45rpm single (an anecdote detailed in the opening paragraph of my memoir Boy About Town). I remember “Oh Girl” – who doesn’t? – but I would have had no reason to know much about the Chi-Lites themselves at the time.
Indeed, as my mum and I continued watching Top of the Pops over the next few years, then to the extent that the Chi-Lites may have appeared in person, I wouldn’t have known them from the Stylistics or the Spinners. There’s nothing spurious about this: I wouldn’t expect an 8- or 9-year-old kid watching Soul Train in the States to distinguish Mud from Showaddywaddy, or the Glitter Band from the Rubettes. The point being, for all that I gradually came to know the Chi-Lites as a name of merit, I always had them down as “just” a vocal group.
And that’s exactly how they are described in all four of the Billboard Books of Hits that I own: a “[R&B] Vocal group from Chicago.” There is no indication that they might have written their own songs, had more than a passing hand in the production of their hits. And to be frank, the back cover of 1972’s A Lonely Man indicates nothing of deeper artistic merit either. It looks like it was laid out by Brunswick Records’ assistant art intern after a couple of Friday night cocktails at the local lounge: type-faces do battle with each other; the four singing members are given descending, cut-out head-shots that accentuate their Afros, distinguishable as two pairs by choice of facial hair; and the group’s other albums are bluntly cross-promoted, as is an ad for the Brunswick Record Club (“1 Year Membership $2.00”). Brunswick was a great soul label, and additionally cool for earlier picking up The Who when no one else in the States was willing to do so, but as per the legendary Atlantic Records of the era, its soul LPs were not packaged with anything like the reverence afforded rock albums of the era.
So maybe it took me a minute to hone in on the credits and notice that, other than the second song “Living In The Footsteps of Another Man” – which had already caught my attention with its symphonic opening stab – and a later cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler),” all songs were either solely or co-composed by one of these four Afro’d vocalists, the exquisitely-named Eugene Record. Maybe it took another minute to look further, down below the song titles, and discover he’d produced the album as well. And then, that he and one of his co-writers, Carl Davis, took arrangement credits too, alongside Brunswick’s house arranger Tom Washington. This was clearly not your average “[R&B] vocal group from Chicago.”
I was by now seated on the bed, relieved that I had no imminent appointment, listening intently to the next song. While “Oh Girl” signified the Chi-Lites’ songwriting and hit-making qualities, “Love Is” (absent the ellipsis that marked the influential cartoon of the era) confirmed the Chi-Lites’ artistry. It opens with perfect four-part vocal harmonies underpinned by a resonant single-note string part; those vocals give way to a sustained organ chord that I presume to be a Hammond, this one underpinned by syncopated key pads; this in turn slowly segues into swooping strings juxtaposed with a symphonic horn melody all underpinned now by piano, finally giving away to the light-weight soul drums of the era, a syncopated rhythm guitar, a walking bass, and the introduction of the vocals proper, accompanied by the full orchestral arrangements that stops just short of being overly dominant.
It’s a sensational song, placed where most LP’s of the era, if they were to be more filler than killer, would take a dip: in the middle of Side 1. As much to the point, “Love Is” does not follow formula. Even without that integral, minute-long build-up, this is no simple verse/chorus composition; breaking down the song’s arrangement for my Rock Academy students would provide me an hour or two’s homework.
Clearly, Eugene Record was never your run-of-the-mill soul composer. Again, you may have known as much all along. But flash back to my origin story: 8-year old Top of the Pops-watching me never progressed to discos; he became early teenage punk me and later embraced soul as it was marketed to the mod revival movement of my mid-teens, first with Motown, then with Stax, and later with Northern Soul, none of which overlapped on a Venn Diagram of Soul with the Chi-Lites. So even while my adult research on Wilson Pickett and Eddie Floyd had me retrace those artists’ migration from Alabama to Detroit at the birth of the 1950s vocal group explosion, and for all that I could talk to you about the importance of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters in that city, or of Fortune Records, and especially of The Falcons, often billed as “The First Soul Group,” I had no idea that in that other big industrial northern capital, Chicago, The Chi-Lites were already forming at high school, that a core quartet would stick together through thick and thin an entire decade before finally breaking the R&B Top 10 in 1969 with “Give It Away.”
Still, a lack of knowledge can allow one to receive some as an empty vessel. And as “Love Is” gave way that day to “Being In Love,” a more up-tempo song on which strings held back and guitars and bass and drums hold court, my vessel began to flow over with its own love for what I was hearing.1 That next meant Side 1’s conclusion, the title track, an absolute dead ringer for The Chi-Lites other R&B #1, “Have You Seen Her?” complete with spoken parts and similar chorus. There is no law against plagiarizing your own hits – it was good enough for Elvis, The Beatles, Abba, Buzzcocks, and just about anyone else you want to name – but damn if it doesn’t force a frequent double take.
Fortunately, Side 2 returns to originality. “The Man & The Woman (The Boy & The Girl)” makes a lyrical point of duality, and though the line, “if there was no guns, there would be no shooting” is perhaps not profound, the song itself is more percussive than its predecessors on Side 1, hinting at the disco that will start emerging with the likes of George McRae and the Hues Corporation over the next year, the bass coming to prominence here, though the string arrangement is still to die for (and the fuzz guitar from “Have You Seen Her?” makes a return).
Since penning this article in August 2023, full episodes of genre-bending live 1970s TV show the Midnight Special have been officially uploaded on YouTube. This one is the best of the best, with the great Wilson Pickett, about whom I wrote a long-overdue biography, introducing the Chi-Lites, who deliver a floor-stomping, show-stopping ‘Stoned Out of My Mind.’ I have set the YouTube clip to play at the correct moment.
I have long maintained that every classic album is rendered such by a less-than-classic song that reinforces the rest of said album’s brilliance, and “Ain’t Too Much Of Nothin’” is A Lonely Man’s proof of this theory. It is merely very good. But this is just musical calm before the storm: that interpretation of “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” which, upon original release by Marvin Gaye the previous year at the end of What’s Going On and then as a single in its own right, had set a high bar for political soul of the era. Yet the Chi-Lites had been there already, with consecutive hits in 1971 of their own with “We Are Neighbors” (sampled by Groove Armada on the 1999 dance hit “If Everybody Looked The Same”) and “(For God’s Sake) Give More Power To The People.” On A Lonely Man, The Chi-Lites re-set “Inner City Blues” in a lower key than Gaye, and if it’s sacrilegious to suggest they might have improved on the original, I wager that their version leaves other covers in the dust, Gil Scott-Heron included. The string arrangement in particular, comes up with accompanying melodies that Gaye and co. had not imagined, but credit also the vocal performances (along with Eugene’s lead tenor, we have Robert Lester on second tenor, Marshall Thompson on baritone, and Craedel Jones on bass, and after well over a decade together, they know each other’s voices like the back of their proverbial hands), the call-and-responses, and a heavily reverberating snare during instrumental sections.
My revelatory listening experience was set to conclude with the eight-and-a-half minute epic “The Coldest Days of My Life.” In truncated form, this had been an R&B Top 10 hit in the States, but in the UK of my 8-year-old self, “Oh Girl” didn’t even make the top 10, and there were no further hits from the act for another year. I don’t believe I’d ever heard this song in full before.
To wit: the lone violin (though backed by a band arrangement), crying out in accompaniment to Record’s tale of dark days, echoing his melody as he intones the “eyes as a child,” hit me in that Memphis bedroom as powerfully as if I’d stumbled upon Yehudi Menuhin standing on a street corner busking for loose change. The song’s beauty also comes from its unhurried pacing, a simple chordal structure which initially repeats so often one thinks it might never progress. When the change does eventually come, it’s in the form of a simple modulation up a single tone, before dropping back down, yet it’s enough to lift the mournful song towards the musical heavens: it is chillingly orgasmic.
That “The Coldest Days of My Life” follows on from “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler),” suggests that the Chi-Lites had supreme confidence in their own songs, believing they could conclude the album with something of equally powerful resonance.2 That they succeeded so emphatically is testimony to everyone involved: the vocalists, primary string arranger Tom Washington, all the uncredited musicians - but especially, to Eugene Record, whose artistic control over this album appears no less total than Pete Townshend’s over Quadrophenia a year later.
I have been knocked into submission by many other albums over my life. I do give myself to music and it often rewards me for my faith. But usually, I have expected greatness, or at least been tipped off to it. Sitting here writing about A Lonely Man in 2023, I can not recall another occasion when an album of which I had expected perhaps mere goodness, at best, has ever had this effect upon me.
Had my hosts been at home, I would have offered to buy the LP from them right there and then. But they weren’t, and I was hardly going to take it, even as I suspected it wouldn’t be missed. I couldn’t find a copy at Goner, so I went straight on Discogs and ordered it. It took two attempts to get one in sufficiently VG+ condition, but I have been playing it as I’ve been writing this article, and it’s another reason to praise the enduring merits of vinyl, for though the aforementioned sleeve may indeed be lacking, A Lonely Man received a top mastering job from Brunswick and was pressed on quality US vinyl. My 50-year old copy wears itself well, it cuts deep and reveals tones and depth that are absent from the comparisons I can call up on Spotify.
And here’s the additional rub, the reason that my experience with A Lonely Man could never be replicated by someone listening casually on a streaming platform – because it’s not available online.
Seriously. The most beautiful soul album of all time is unavailable on streaming platforms. The same is true of its predecessor, (For God’s Sake) Give More Power To The People. And these, the Chi-Lites’ third and fourth LPs, are certainly their best. I subsequently picked up the band’s next LP, also on vinyl, A Letter To Myself, and it’s patchy by comparison, the group suffering from “two LP’s-a-year rigmarole,” even as they continued to deliver hit singles. (Belatedly, the group was at least granted a gatefold sleeve that credits every musician, orchestra players included; these may or may not have been the same as played on A Lonely Man.)
Though it may not change the albums’ availability on Spotify and the like,3 I have found out this very moment, while confirming the accuracy of the previous paragraph [this is August 2023], that A Lonely Man is being reissued on vinyl, from the original master tapes, for the first time in 50 years, literally this very week. No need for “deal-with-scratched-vinyl-or-do-without” recommendations as I initially excepted to make. You can hear the LP for yourself the way it was intended. I can only conclude that God evidently does work in mysterious ways, and with even more omniscience than Google and Facebook’s advertising algorithms.
But back for a moment to 2018: Upon return to my house in the Catskills, I went straight to my then-extensive CD collection. Sure enough, I had an 18-song deep promo copy of Greatest Hits of the Chi-Lites, including the truncated “The Coldest Days of My Life.” I must have played it before, as it wasn’t shrink-wrapped. But I couldn’t recall doing so: the depth of the group’s catalogue, in the form of a hits compilation, had gone over my head. And this, again, is why the LP format – specifically, on vinyl – remains the pinnacle of the pop medium, because 15-25 minutes per side is just the right amount of time for an artist to make a perfect sales pitch. And it’s a tactile sales pitch, one where the customer gets to handle the “product,” including a 12” square sleeve which, even allowing for appalling layout, provides context and information, all of which helps make the listening process an experience the likes of which streaming platforms, much as I value their convenience, can not provide.
Before we conclude this particular story, there is an area of concern that needs to be addressed, and it’s this: Gatekeepers of popular music consistently fail to give Black soul acts the critical respect they are due. I’m not aware of critics rallying around Eugene Record’s brilliance the way they have lauded the entrepreneurs who marketed such music; here I can point not just to Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun, who received praise out of proportion to the Black acts they successfully profited from, or even Jim Stewart of Stax, but to the plaudits heaped on Black entrepreneur Berry Gordy but rarely upon the songwriters and producers – and indeed, the supremely talented, singing and dancing performers - who really made Tamla-Motown’s hits and made him rich. Even Stephen Edelwine on AllMusic takes fully five sentences of his positively loving Chi-Lites biography to as much as mention Eugene Record’s songwriting involvement. It’s hardly surprising that so many of us, and/or I certainly speak for myself, concluded that the Chi-Lites were of a type with other vocal groups of the 1960s and 1970s.
This oversight in credibility and critical respect can be referenced another way. The Chi-Lites had two Top 20 US pop LPS, and five Top 40 US pop singles in the early 1970s, including a #3 and a #1. They logged 28 Top 40 R&B hits between 1969 and 1984, eleven of those making the Top 10 (we have yet to mention “I Found Sunshine,” “Stoned Out Of My Mind” or indeed, “There Will Never Be Any Peace (Until God Is Seated at the Conference Table)”), and five consecutive Top 5 R&B LPs in the 1970s out of the dozen that charted. They have been inducted into the Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame, the Vocal Group Hall of Fame, and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Though they only released their first album in 1969, a decade after forming, they have nonetheless been eligible for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame since 1995. They have yet to even be nominated. Allow that Rock & Roll is a Black music to begin with, and that the Hall welcomed Duran Duran and Eminem this past year, and it’s hard not to flag the injustice.
Three-quarters of this seminal quartet have now passed on. Marshall Thompson, sole surviving member, continues to tour the Chi-Lites. Aptly or not, he will be playing in Las Vegas on August 25 and 26, when the re-issued A Lonely Man LP officially hits the shops. I love my 50-year old vinyl copy, and though it’s not the same exact copy I sat with in that Memphis AirBnB, it carries with it a specific memory that no other replica of the master tapes will ever be able to provide. But I have placed an order for the fresh pressing all the same. The most beautiful soul album in the world deserves a pristine performance. On vinyl, but of course.
I also noted now that this song was co-written by Record with Brunswick performer Barbara Acklin, as were other hits on the label. The couple were not married, however, which I’ve subsequently learned is a common misconception amongst soul aficionados.
As I have just learned, Eugene Record and co-writer Carl Davis had originally given the song to Walter Jackson, who’d recorded a shorter version in 1970.
It did not. The albums are still unavailable on streaming platforms.
Beautiful work Tony! I had totally forgotten about this LP.
I, like you, am a great admirer of The Chi-Lites and the songwriting of Eugene Record. I have the one CD "Greatest Hits" package from Rhino and the 2CD "Ultimate" one from Brunswick itself to prove it.
"Have You Seen Her?" and "Oh Girl" were their biggest hits, but there was a lot more to them than that. The arrangements of the songs haunt me, as do the lyrics: "(For God's Sake) Give More Power To The People" is still a relevant message.
I have to suspect they are more obscure figures than many of their '70s counterparts simply because Brunswick, despite its high quality music, had a lot of business problems, mostly originating with the shady deals of label boss Nat Tarnopol. If they had been on Motown or Philadelphia International, they might have become more famous, but their first loyalty always was to Chicago, the city in their name.
And so Record set himself up as a sort of successor to Curtis Mayfield in the pantheon of Chicago soul music, though he had less hits overall.