THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,459) Ben E. King — “If You’ve Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody”/“Come Together”
Ben E. King’s (see #85, 254, 597) spectacular out of left field ’70 LP Rough Edges is “a curious work with a laid-back feel notable for its extended play mashups combining popular songs on single tracks”. (Altrockchick, https://altrockchick.com/2021/02/01/ben-e-king-the-very-best-of-classic-music-review/) I’ve already featured King’s mashup of “In the Midnight Hour/Lay Lady Lay” (see #254). Today, it’s the James Ray hit “If You’ve Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody” and the Beatles’ (and my lawyers tell me to mention Chuck Berry’s) iconic “Come Together”. What King does is so cool, reinventing these songs as industrial soul/rock. You say you want an Industrial Soul/Rock Revolution!
Don Heckman flipped over the album in the New York Times on August 2, 1970:
An interesting trend seems to be developing in which black artists finally are turning the tables on an old music industry practice — the making of “covers.” In the past, “covers” usually consisted of note‐for‐note simulations by white performers of recordings that originally were made by black singers and musicians. Lately, however, performers like Ike & Tina Turner, Isaac Hayes, and now Ben E. King, have been producing their own versions of tunes originally written and recorded by such white stars as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Typically, black performers haven’t been content to simply imitate: at times their versions are even superior to the originals. Ben E. King, late of the Drifters and best known for his early sixties hit “Spanish Harlem,” adds another wrinkle to the process in his first release for the new Maxwell label. Three familiar pieces, Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,” Lennon & McCartney’s “Come Together” and Bobby Russell’s “Little Green Apples” are considerably enlivened by their mixture with Wilson Pickett’s “In The Midnight Hour” (with “Lay Lady Lay”), Rudy Clark’s “If You’ve Gotta Make A Fool of Somebody” (with “Come Together”) and Paul Vance’ “She Lets Her Hair Down” (with “Apples”). Surprisingly, the blend heightens the effectiveness of all the tunes. . . . The consistency with which King finds vigorously original interpretations of such familiar material is, for a performer rarely identified with such songs, remarkable. If this is the current style in “covers,” we can be happy that something new and creative has come out of the cynical past.
Andrew Hamilton adds:
This Ben E. King LP on Larry Maxwell’s Maxwell label interrupted a string of Atco releases. Limited sales made it a one-off and King began another string of albums for the Atco family on Atlantic Records. The Bob Crewe production finds [King] singing with fervor on songs the likes of which he never sniffed at while recording for Atco. . . . [T]here’s no attempt to re-create his popular solo or Drifters recordings; that coupled with a weak promotional effort made Rough Edges an early entry in the cutout bins.
Here’s James Ray ’61 (#22/#10 R&B):
Here’s Maxine Brown ’65 (#63):
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