Music |
Moments From This Theatre
Dan Penn & Spooner Oldham
By
Published: Jan 01, 2005
Category:
Rock
Moments From This Theatre
Dan Penn & Spooner Oldham
The history of great pop music is made up of countless unsung heroes — the producers, songwriters and studio musicians — whose contributions are mostly celebrated by those who pay attention to liner notes, and maybe the occasional European or Japanese obsessive.
Southern soul legend Dan Penn is one such hero. If you don’t know Penn — and you’re not alone if you don’t — you’ve certainly heard his work. An architect of the Muscle Shoals sound, he wrote or co-wrote enough R&B hits to create a solid anthology: Aretha’s ‘Do Right Woman,’ James Carr’s ‘Dark End of the Street’, James & Bobby Purify’s ‘I’m Your Puppet’, Percy Sledge’s ‘It Tears Me Up’ and Wilson Pickett’s ‘You Left the Water Running’.
Not bad for a poor white kid from Vernon, Alabama.
And writing was only the first of his talents. In the studio, he was an instrumental cog in Chip Moman’s American Studios in Memphis, where he produced the Box Tops’ hits ‘The Letter’ and ‘Cry Like a Baby’ (which he also wrote).
As for performing his songs, Penn’s never really taken to the limelight. During the height of his success in the late ’60s/early ’70s, he recorded a handful of ignored singles and a fairly mixed solo record, ‘Nobody’s Fool,’ that never really went anywhere.
Where Penn’s legend really lies is with his unreleased demo recordings, drooled over by collectors and said by the few fortunate to have heard them to be more soulful than any of the recorded hits themselves.
Over the past decade, Penn’s lack of output has been somewhat remedied. He recorded the superb ‘Do Right Man’ and wrote some excellent new tunes — like the title track for Solomon Burke’s 2002 comeback ‘Don’t Give Up on Me’. He covered Van Morrison’s ‘Bright Side of the Road’ as an ironic bookend to his own "Dark End of the Street’ and produced solid discs for fellow legends Irma Thomas and Bobby Purify.
Now we get the American release of ‘Moments From This Theatre’, a live recording of a series of duet concerts he did in the U.K. and Ireland in the late 1990s with keyboardist and frequent co-conspirator Lyndon ‘Spooner’ Oldham. If this disc sounds like a couple of old friends sitting around and playing some tunes, that’s because it is. Penn and Oldham met almost four decades ago in the house band of Fame Studios, and have written and performed together off-and-on ever since.
The approach is spontaneous and relaxed — just Penn’s voice and guitar, supported by Oldham’s harmonies and Wurlitzer electric piano. The feeling is down-home and spiritual, full of the kind of casual joy that comes from decades of familiarity. They take it slow. Each song seems move at a tempo that’s a beat or two slower than you might otherwise expect. But that laid-back style simply adds to the intimacy of the date.
All the hits are covered — ‘I’m Your Puppet’, ‘Sweet Inspiration’, ‘Cry Like a Baby’, ‘Do Right Woman’, ‘Dark End of the Street’, ‘A Woman Left Lonely’ — with the ease that’s only available to the people who’ve written them. Essentially, Penn and Oldham are reclaiming the tunes they’ve penned, taking them back and making them their own. Listen, for instance, to how ‘Do Right Woman, Do Right Man’ is immediately made over from a woman’s song of sexual need to man’s testament of commitment and devotion. Quite a transformation.
The key to the success is Penn’s remarkable voice. With a slight tinge of a drawl and a speck of quiet self-consciousness, he sings gracefully and soulfully. It’s this mix of country and soul that defies today’s musical narrowcasting and forms the core of the southern musical experience that Penn personifies.
Now if only we could get our hands on those demos.
— Stuart Feil, today’s Guest Butler, is a New York-based editor and writer.
To order ‘Moments From This Theatre’ from Amazon.com, click here.
