It is a pretty awful thing to say, what with music being so wide and all embracing that there should be no distinction of race or colour, but rock music tends to be for the white boys. True there are exceptions to the rule, but even in the heady days of sixties liberation you would more likely find a long haired white guy crooning, camped over a guitar than a black guy.
Jimi Hendrix of course was one of the most influential exceptions to rule. Here was a young, gifted African-American singing Dylan and Tim Rose at a time when soul music was the main stay of black music and the underground Funk scene was in its glorious raw infancy.
Hendrix's Influence
Hendrix managed to draw on both black and white scenes for his musical vision. He synthesised the two cultures, fully embodying Rock’s tendency towards fragility and self destruction and Funk’s visceral bravado.
Hendrix’s flexibility and success gave rise to the short-lived Black Rock movement of the late sixties and early seventies. Curated by Dante Carfagna and released on the Jones imprint, a sublabel of Carfagna’s own Memphix records, Chains and Black Exhaust strives to document this scene, attempting to join the dots between Hendrix and Funkadelic.
All of the seventeen cuts are rare as hen’s teeth; you’d be pushed to find these tracks in any format let alone on the original vinyl. Sadly the fidelity of the recordings is fairly low, but the raw energy of the performances is more than evident. The guitars are high and wild and the break beats are hard and heavy.
Chains and Black Exhaust- The Album
Black Merda are present, and along with Curtis Mayfield are probably the most recognisable of the acts on show. Black Merda cut some heavily Hendrix influenced records in the early seventies. Muddy Waters’ “Cynthy Ruth” is given an awe-inspiring workout by the band here with scratching wah-wah guitar and howling vocals. Iron Knowledge’s “Show Stopper” really is just that; a heavy hitting fuzzed out guitar rocker, with such an infectious groove the vocalists can barely restrain themselves to sing in tune.
Elsewhere Tiny Tex and the J Jones Connection supply some slow and dirty funk with “Who am I?”, BlackRock “Yeah Yeah” starts off with some psychedelic swirling piano before moving into a Funk stomp, and LA Carnival showcase the JB connection with a hard bass and horn heavy groove.
Gran Am’s “Get High” makes a welcome appearance, and will be instantly recognisable to those fans of the excellent Product Placement. It typifies the raw end of the spectrum of this record. The band can barely sing, or play the guitar but, as with every other cut on this album, the track still burns with its own infectious energy.
Chains and Black Exhaust is an essential album, not just as a historical document but as an indicator of just how much great music was being made in the late sixties in the most unlikeliest of places and styles. Though it would be acts such as Hendrix who would later splinter scenes and genres to such an extent that finding common musical threads would become almost impossible, his inspiration on the Black Rock scene shows that young black guys had as much claim on the direction of rock music as their white counterparts.
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