Eugene McDaniels - 1970 - Outlaw

Eugene McDaniels

1970

Outlaw

01. Outlaw 5:00
02. Sagittarius Red 3:03
03. Welfare City 2:52
04. Silent Majority 4:10
05. Love Letter To America 3:57
06. Unspoken Dreams Of Light 6:40
07. Cherrystones 3:08
08. Reverend Lee 6:31
09. Black Boy 2:59

Bass – Ron Carter
Drums – Ray Lucas
Guitar – Eric Weissberg, Hugh McCracken
Percussion – Buck Clarke
Piano – Mother Hen

Under conditions of national emergency, like now, there are only two kinds of people - those who work for freedom and those who do not... the good guys vs. the bad guys. -Mc D.

With special thanks to Les McCann

Eugene “Gene” McDaniels first broke through in the early ‘60s with pop soul hits like “A Hundred Pounds of Clay.” But that was a different time...and a different man. By the time McDaniels recorded his 1970 album Outlaw, he had re-christened himself “the left rev mc d” and penned the soul-jazz protest anthem “Compared to What,” first recorded in 1966 by Les McCann and turned into a standard by McCann and saxophonist Eddie Harris on their 1969 album Swiss Movement. Indeed, the front cover of Outlaw left no doubt as to the radicalization of McDaniels’ politics. As Pat Thomas puts it in the liner notes that we have added to this reissue, “One sees Middle America’s worst nightmare coming to life. There’s the badass Reverend Lee himself holding a bible. Righteous Susan Jane in a jean jacket and black French resistance turtleneck is wielding a machine gun, and McDaniels’ then-wife Ramona appears as a soul sister with cross your heart Viva Zapata! ammo belts. In the forefront is a large human skull, just in case you didn’t already get the message.” The Nixon White House sure got the message; legend has it that the administration was so offended by the lyrics to “Silent Majority” (“Silent Majority is calling out loud to you and me from Arlington Cemetery”) that either Spiro Agnew or Nixon’s Chief of Staff personally called Atlantic, asking them to stop working with McDaniels. Politics aside, Outlaw offers a heady blend of soul, jazz, folk, and rock grooves played by Ron Carter, Eric Weissberg, and Hugh McCracken among others, with legendary producer Joel Dorn at the controls and cult favorite William S. Fischer operating as Musical Director. Oft-sampled, and never more relevant, Real Gone’s 50th anniversary release of Outlaw comes in a neon red vinyl pressing limited to 700 copies. And those liner notes we mentioned previously? They come with some pithy McDaniels quotes that confirm his revolutionary fervor remained unquenched till his death in 2011.

"What the fuck is this?” you may ask yourself? The answer may surprise you. First of all, this is a folk-pop album and McDaniels seems to be trying (successfully) at times to sound like Mick Jagger, and his band sounds like the Stones of Let It Bleed. Odd that a black man would apparently model his vocal performance on a white man who’d copped his singing from R&B singers, but it works. A bit convoluted perhaps, trust me he makes it work. One song reminded me strongly of an outtake from the musical Hair. It’s a weird album, but a very, very good one. It’s just next to impossible to categorize. It’s country-rock-funk-folk. It’s got a good beat throughout.

Unsurprisingly, Outlaw‘s politics are radical and deeply held. The lyrics—if not the music—are in-your-face, up-against-the-wall stuff. It’s interesting to note that McDaniel started off as a Jackie Wilson-type singer. His first hit record was the soul standard “A Hundred Pounds of Clay” and he worked with Snuff Garrett and Burt Bacharach early in his career. He’d also written the topical protest song “Compared to What” taking aim at Lyndon Johnson and his deeply unpopular Vietnam War, so Outlaw wasn’t completely out of the blue for the guy, but it was still unusual for just about ANY artist—Black or white—recording for a major label to affect such a radical image. Apparently, someone in the Nixon administration got wind of the track “Silent Majority” (“Silent majority / Is calling out loud to you and me / From Arlington Cemetery / To stand up tall for humanity”) and it was either Vice President Spiro Agnew or else Richard Nixon’s Chief of Staff who personally called Atlantic Records to complain, asking them to stop working with McDaniels.

Outlaw was produced by Grammy-winner Joel Dorn and arranged by William S. Fischer. Both had worked before with friends of McDaniels, like Roberta Flack (McDaniels wrote her “Feel Like Making Love” hit and other songs for the vocalist) and Les McCann and Eddie Harris (who turned his “Compared to What” into an electrifying jazz standard on their live Swiss Movement album in 1969). Their support is sympathetic to McDaniels’ goals, but you have to wonder what they made of such an almost deliberately uncommercial project. It’s one of those albums where you almost can’t believe it exists. I’m glad it does.

In the early- to mid-'60s, Gene McDaniels was a successful singing star whose carefully orchestrated records, full of production polish, split the difference between R&B and pop. He hit the charts with the singles "A Hundred Pounds of Clay," "Tower of Strength," and "Chip Chip" and was a popular performer on-stage and on television. However, McDaniels was a more thoughtful and politically conscious man than his hits would suggest, and after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., he left America to live in Sweden and Denmark and focus on songwriting. When he returned to the United States in 1970, he was billing himself as Eugene McDaniels, and his music took a sharp turn into a new direction. Few would recognize the guy who sang "A Hundred Pounds of Clay" and the artist who made 1970's Outlaw as the same person unless they were told, and even then they might not believe it. On the opening title track, a loose country-rock number about liberated women, McDaniels sounds remarkably like Mick Jagger (an interesting creative choice since McDaniels would record "Jagger the Dagger," an unflattering appraisal of the Rolling Stones' frontman, on his next album, 1971's Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse). Even when McDaniels' vocals more closely resemble his early hits, his music is radically different. Outlaw is a set of songs that exist in a place bordered by jazz, rock, and funk, and McDaniels' phrasing is expressive and adventurous in a way it had never been before. Most importantly, as a songwriter McDaniels had eagerly embraced the counterculture and the issues of the day, and Outlaw is full of smart, pointed lyrics that speak of race, class, and cultural division in a style that's articulate and just a bit theatrical, as if this were the original cast album to an off-Broadway revue about the turbulence of the early '70s. The musicians (who include Ron Carter, Hugh McCracken, and Ray Lucas) bring an unflashy virtuosity to their performances, and Joel Dorn's production is suitably clean and unobtrusive, giving the music a welcome sense of focus. At a time when African-American consciousness was exploding in new and provocative directions in popular music, Outlaw shows Eugene McDaniels was at the vanguard of this revolution, even if the album didn't find an audience until it became a cult item decades after the fact.