Linernotes - Playboy Side Of Town
A touch of Afro-Cuban percussion kicks us off and takes us over to “The Playboy Side of Town”, a Friday night song to listen to as you dress for the pub. “Bionic Man, Parts 1 & 2” is an extended disco workout, complete with perhaps the only synthesized snare drum in the entire Crazy Cajun catalogue, and featuring former BB King bandleader Calvin Owens on trumpet. Funky tunes like this one remind us that not all was bad during the Disco era.
The Duke/Peacock Bobby Bland standard “I’ll Take Care of You” is one of the few tunes contained here not written by Perry. Perry had sung the demo for Bobby Bland, and cut the song later for Huey Meaux. In all likelihood, “I’ll Take Care of You” was one of what Perry remembers he and his friends calling at the time a “rent song”. These were tunes hastily scribbled down and turned over to Don Robey for a few hundred dollars cash on the barrelhead, and later orchestrated by Duke bandleader Joe Scott into the lush creations we hear today on the Bland and Junior Parker collections. Most are credited to one “Deadric Malone”, a tunesmith who, had he existed, would have rivalled Willie Dixon as a writer of blues.
(In fact, “I’ll Take Care of You” was written by Joe Medwick, who also penned the Bland classics “Cry, Cry, Cry”, “Yield Not To Temptation”, “That’s The Way Love Is”, and with Johnny Copeland was the co-author of “Further On Up The Road”. If Don Robey had not have had Joe Medwick writing for him he would have had to invent him, which in a crooked kind of way he did. At any rate, Medwick’s artistry will be the subject of an Edsel release slated for later this year.)
“Then You Came” is one of Perry’s more tender vocal performances, a gospel-drenched confessional anthem, a little suggestive of the Stones’ “Moonlight Mile”. “I Think They’d Sell the Sunshine” is a world-weary diatribe worthy of the great soul poet Curtis Mayfield, and its lyrics lead one to believe that Perry was privy to one of Maggie Thatcher’s more rabid apoplexies of privatization. Perry is not a songwriter content to limit himself to love songs, as this number and Volume 1’s topical “Three K’s “ (which memorializes two fallen Kennedys and MLK) and “Watergate” attest. Included on this disc are eight alternate takes of songs on Volume 1, including the stellar “Building A Home, Parts One & Two” and the achingly tender “Heaven Sent Angel”.
~John Nova Lomax, April 1999
The Duke/Peacock Bobby Bland standard “I’ll Take Care of You” is one of the few tunes contained here not written by Perry. Perry had sung the demo for Bobby Bland, and cut the song later for Huey Meaux. In all likelihood, “I’ll Take Care of You” was one of what Perry remembers he and his friends calling at the time a “rent song”. These were tunes hastily scribbled down and turned over to Don Robey for a few hundred dollars cash on the barrelhead, and later orchestrated by Duke bandleader Joe Scott into the lush creations we hear today on the Bland and Junior Parker collections. Most are credited to one “Deadric Malone”, a tunesmith who, had he existed, would have rivalled Willie Dixon as a writer of blues.
(In fact, “I’ll Take Care of You” was written by Joe Medwick, who also penned the Bland classics “Cry, Cry, Cry”, “Yield Not To Temptation”, “That’s The Way Love Is”, and with Johnny Copeland was the co-author of “Further On Up The Road”. If Don Robey had not have had Joe Medwick writing for him he would have had to invent him, which in a crooked kind of way he did. At any rate, Medwick’s artistry will be the subject of an Edsel release slated for later this year.)
“Then You Came” is one of Perry’s more tender vocal performances, a gospel-drenched confessional anthem, a little suggestive of the Stones’ “Moonlight Mile”. “I Think They’d Sell the Sunshine” is a world-weary diatribe worthy of the great soul poet Curtis Mayfield, and its lyrics lead one to believe that Perry was privy to one of Maggie Thatcher’s more rabid apoplexies of privatization. Perry is not a songwriter content to limit himself to love songs, as this number and Volume 1’s topical “Three K’s “ (which memorializes two fallen Kennedys and MLK) and “Watergate” attest. Included on this disc are eight alternate takes of songs on Volume 1, including the stellar “Building A Home, Parts One & Two” and the achingly tender “Heaven Sent Angel”.
~John Nova Lomax, April 1999