At the end of this month Ace will be releasing the eagerly anticipated Dyke & The Blazers set: "We Got More Soul/ The Ultimate Broadway Funk" (CDBGP2 180). To keep you going until then, Ace’s man on the West Coast Alec Palao has kindly sent in an interview with Dyke’s drummer James Gadson. Over to Alec....

Dyke & The Blazers’ Hollywood sessions are today rightfully acknowledged as some of the most incendiary funk workouts known to man. And though Dyke led the band, much of the credit must go to the accompanying musicians: a crack team of Los Angeles R&B session men that simultaneously had record success on their own as the Watts 103rd St Rhythm Band. Trombone player and arranger Ray Jackson helped Dyke translate his ideas to tape, and while the keyboard and horn men often switched personnel between sessions, the rhythm section almost always constituted the holy trinity of guitarist Al McKay, bass player Melvin Dunlap and drummer James Gadson, a funky rollercoaster whose smoking grooves were on the cutting edge of late 60s R&B. A consummate technician whose extensive resume runs the gamut from Bill Withers to Paul McCartney, James explains how it went down in the studio with Dyke:

“I think Ray Jackson got the arranging job for Dyke through somebody [and brought us in]. At that time, we were kind of like the house band at a place called De La Soul, up on Slauson. We backed up Gladys Knight and different people when they came through. This was not the Watts band - in fact we didn’t really have a name, though the Watts band came together during that period. I don’t play on the 45s done with Fred Smith, ‘Spreadin’Honey’ and all that, or the first Watts 103rd St Rhythm Band album. From what I hear, Bill Cosby was with Reprise at that time and they were trying to get him to re-sign, so he was doing a lot of favours for people. He and Fred Smith were able to sell the name to Warner Brothers, even though they didn’t have a group at that time. But we went out with Charles Wright as the Watts 103rd St Rhythm Band - we had to learn that first album - and while we were out on the road, Warner Bros accepted us.

“The first time we recorded with Dyke [February 1968], we maybe had one rehearsal, but that was it. That first session was ‘Funky Walk’, the first hit, and James Smith was the bass player. Ray was the arranger, but everyone was contributing. What Dyke brought in was the skeleton [of the tune], not much more than that. Ray listened to him and we would listen to certain things, and then start a groove and put it together. Dyke would be in the room singing it live, so everybody could hear what he was doing - we were always in the same room. They had a drum set already up there at Original Sound, behind a pole, and they didn’t have anything [baffles] around it. Melvin [Dunlap] was on the left side way over in the corner, and Al [McKay] would be kind of like the front. It was almost like a garage recording. Dyke fed off us. He’d say, “yeah, that’s funky!” and would kind of dance along [to demonstrate the groove], “hey, kinda flow this way, pick it up a little bit”: he would do his little thing. He’d hold the mic in his hand, like he was doing a show. Art Laboe saved the live vocal takes all the time, and he used to talk about it, “well, I hope that we don’t try to bury this”, because he would be in there with Paul [Buff, engineer], and he was enjoying it too. Art Barrett wasn’t at all of the dates, but sometimes we’d see him at the beginning or the end of a session.

“‘We Got More Soul’ was probably one of the first hit records that I played on, although I had no idea that that it was a hit record, because I never heard it in California. But people were telling me, man, that sure is funky. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but in the Midwest, in my home town Kansas City, Missouri, St Louis, it was played. The arrangement on ‘Soul’ was nice, Ray Jackson was very clever. As far as we were concerned, ‘We Got More Soul’ and ‘Let A Woman’ were successful, but we didn’t know anything about the business - we knew they weren’t pop, because very few black artists were doing pop – but we thought it was on a scale with everybody else that was out there. I would think we were neck and neck with James Brown, because that was the vein, and he was hot at that time, but we took it and we did it different. Art Laboe told us, “I wanna work with you guys”, and we could have had a production deal, but Charles got wind of it and scared us. He said, if any more of us played on Dyke’s stuff, he was gonna have something done to us at Warner Brothers. For instance, the tune ‘Soul Cake’, that was supposed to be for the band. Because [our work with Dyke] got kinda popular before Wright first hit, he was pretty peeved about it.

“Gabe Flemings, John Rayford and Bill Cannon were the other Watts members on the sessions - we needed the money. But we had a good time. With the Watts band, the drum beats that I did were mine, but we didn’t get to create, and that’s why the Dyke stuff was fun, because we’d just come in and write with him. So playing the breaks, I was free. He was lucky to have us, but Dyke let us express ourselves so it was good thing for us too. We enjoyed the fact it was just a groove. We were really into establishing something that would be successful, and a lot of times we’d be over here in my garage, and we’d practise for hours with all these different grooves and stuff. Al McKay was probably one of the best rhythm guitar players in the world. I don’t think I’ve played with anyone like [Melvin and Al] since, and I don’t know if I could even play like that again, because it was a phase when I thought that way: I was listening to people like Idris Muhammed, Bernard Purdie, and Al Jackson Jr. I came to California as a jazz musician, I didn’t know how to play R&B, so I had to figure it out and here I can see where I was developing. [By the time of] ‘Black Boy From The Ghetto’, it seemed like I’d gotten more refined. But I enjoyed all that Dyke stuff, because it was the way I was learning how to play.

“I was blown away when I heard he’d died, because I liked Dyke, we all did. We used to joke around with him, and he even used to borrow my clothes sometimes, like when he was playing at the Whiskey and needed something to wear. Dyke was a real nice guy, down-to-earth, didn’t have an ego, he just had some problems, that’s all. I never knew what was going on in Phoenix. I remember Art Laboe really liked Dyke, and really took care of him. Dyke had some of the prettiest Cadillacs, beautiful Eldorados, that Art had bought for him.”